Beneath a Transparent Dream novel · Chapter 21 of 24
Chapter 21: After the Room
Nobody in the ballroom spoke.
Matilda still had the card in one hand and the microphone in the other.
She turned the card over, and then she tore it across the middle, and then again.
"This is the apology I was handed," she said, and her voice came out of the four corners of the room, level and clear. "Somebody wrote it for me and told me to read it. I've been given a card in front of a crowd before."
Nobody laughed.
"I'm not unwell," Matilda said. "My grandmother's building was mortgaged behind my back, and the proof is on the lectern."
She looked at Judith.
"You asked me to apologise in my own kitchen. I'm not sorry. Sign it."
Judith stood with her hand flat on the county seal.
"This is a private matter between a mother and a daughter-in-law," she said, and her voice shook for the first time.
"You hired a photographer."
An old man rose from the head table, with white hair and a very straight back.
He was the board chairman, and he had sat through the whole evening without touching his plate.
"Judith," he said. "Sign the release."
"Sit down," Judith said.
"The board has just heard your voice say you knew where that money went. Sign the release, and sign it where they can see."
Judith looked down at the page.
She looked up, and for a moment she looked at every one of them, three hundred people with their chairs turned.
Then she bent and put the nib on the line.
The scratch of it carried through the speakers, long and slow.
She signed J. Caldecott, as she had signed everything for forty years, and put the cap back on the pen.
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