Chapter 11: The Gala

At nine o'clock six hundred people in evening clothes sat in the ballroom of the Drake Hotel, and my husband stood at the podium.

Behind him a screen showed a photo of a younger Preston in a basement office, with a coffee in one hand.

Ten Years of Corbin Freight, said the banner.

I had put on the black dress from my own closet that Dolores had rescued, and a pair of my mother's earrings.

I walked in through the side doors with the letter in my hand.

A security man stepped in front of me.

I held up my founder's badge.

"I'm on the founding papers," I said. "Check."

He checked.

He stepped back.

"Family," Preston was saying into the microphone, in his warm, rich, public voice, "is what a company is built on. My mother taught me that."

He smiled at the governor in the front row.

"My wife of ten years has taken some time for herself. We ask for your respect and your privacy."

I walked up the center aisle.

A woman at one table saw me and nudged her husband. Heads turned, row by row.

Preston's eyes found me as I approached the stage.

His smile held.

"Leah," he said, softly, into the microphone. "This isn't the time."

"It is exactly the time."

I stepped up onto the stage and took the microphone off its stand.

He didn't try to stop me. Six hundred people were watching, and he could not look like a man who wrestled his wife.

I held up the envelope.

"Ten years ago I waited at Union Station for a man named Lane."

The room went silent.

"I'd met him on a train. We talked all night. He told me to wait for him at gate six, and I did. I waited three hours in the rain."

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