Chapter 19: Play It

"She stays," the youngest said.

He didn't use the microphone.

His voice was thin, and it carried anyway, because the ballroom had gone so silent that I could hear the chandelier hum.

The guard's hand stayed on my shoulder.

"Sweetheart," Carina said gently from the podium. "Sit down. You're not well."

"I'm not sick."

He came around the end of the head table and down the three steps from the stage.

"I've been sick for twelve years," he said.

"Please," she said into the microphone, and her voice filled the room. "He's grieving. We all are."

"I was nineteen," he said.

He walked into the aisle between the tables with his hands open at his sides.

"I was in the back seat of a car that Dominic was driving, and he was drunk, and so were all of us."

"And your son didn't pull us out," he said, to the old woman at table one. "Nobody pulled anybody out."

A woman gasped near the front.

Carina touched the microphone, and the sound went with a hard click.

He kept speaking, without it.

"He died because Dominic drove us drunk and he was in the car. Then we put it in the water and said he saved us."

Somebody at table four shouted, "Sit him down!"

"He's drunk," a man said loudly.

At the head table, Paolo stood up so fast that his chair fell over.

His face was running with tears.

"It's true," he said. "Oh my God. It's all true, and I've been lying to everybody for twelve years."

"Paolo," Dominic said, very low.

"No. I'm done."

Carina's smile had not changed.

Her eyes went to the glass booth.

The young man behind the console had both hands on his board.

She nodded to him once.

The ballroom speakers died, and the stage lights flickered and went down to a dim wash.

"I'm so sorry, everyone," she said, without a microphone, in a clear sweet voice.

"These men have been drinking since noon. Security, please. Remove the lady from table nine, and take my friends to a quiet room."

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