Chapter 22: Doorway

Knox's POV

I had listened to that recording every night for six months, alone.

I had never heard it come out of the ceiling of a ballroom.

The buckle clicked, and two hundred people stopped chewing.

Then the scrape of a body across leather came through the speakers, close and ugly, and a woman near me covered her mouth.

"You were driving," the voice said.

It was low and patient and warm, and it filled the gold room from wall to wall.

"Lydia. Lyd. Can you hear me? You were driving. You hear me?"

I kept my hand on the laptop and my eyes on Preston.

He stood frozen at the podium with a wet wrist and his mouth a little open.

"You were driving, and I told you to slow down."

I stopped it there.

The rest of the file was rain and sirens and my brother's last breath, and I would not give two hundred strangers that part.

It was Teddy's, and it was mine.

My hands were shaking on the laptop, and I took them off it and put them in my pockets.

Silence filled the ballroom.

Nobody coughed, and nobody moved.

A man at the front table, a grown man in a good suit, was staring at the floor with his hands in his lap.

At the head table, Judith sat with her napkin clenched in her fist.

I had watched her for a week, perfect and pearled, and I had never seen the real face under it.

Now I did.

It was not the face of a woman who had been lied to.

It was the face of a woman counting how much she had already paid.

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