Four Hundred Guests Watched Him Cheat, So I Took Everything He Had novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: Ten Milligrams
Ellen tapped the microphone twice, and the ballroom heard it.
"Good evening," she said. "I'm Ellen Fenn."
Harlan flinched at the name.
"I was married to this man for sixteen years, and I was not Mrs. Stroud tonight until he put it on my place card."
Nobody laughed.
She stood at the center of the stage with the cane hooked over her arm and her free hand flat on the lectern.
Her voice did not shake.
"Nine months ago, my husband's doctor told me my heart was failing. I believed him. I lay in a bed at St. Brendan's and let them give me injections. I slept through my lunches. I slept through my own daughter's engagement dinner."
"Ellen," Harlan said gently. "You're upset."
"I'm not upset. I am awake. That's what you can't stand."
A murmur ran across the tables.
"Two weeks before my daughter's wedding I stopped swallowing the pills. I watched the wedding from my bed with a clear head. I saw everything."
She turned to the board table, where nine men and women in dark suits sat very still.
"I also saw my husband hold my hand across a proxy form while I was too drugged to read it. He has voted my late husband's forty percent of this company ever since. I never agreed to that."
"That's a private matter," Harlan said into his own mic, and then he saw that nobody was listening to him.
"Is he in this room?" Ellen asked. "The doctor?"
Heads turned.
At a corner table by the bar, a gray-haired man in a camel coat tried to become part of the wall.
"Doctor," my mother said, very politely. "Would you like to tell these people what you gave me?"
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