Chapter 25: Section Fourteen

I was in the middle of my vows when a car came up my grandmother's dirt road.

Sixty guests sat on folding chairs in the rose garden, and all forty-one bushes were in bloom.

The officiant had just asked Nathaniel to repeat after him.

"I, Nathaniel, take you, Claire," he began.

Gravel crunched at the gate.

A long black car stopped, and the engine cut off.

Nathaniel stopped speaking, and his hand closed hard around mine.

The back door opened.

An old man stepped out in a black overcoat and leather gloves, in the middle of June.

He was tall, with white hair combed straight back, and he had Nathaniel's gray eyes in a face thirty years older.

"Father," Nathaniel said.

I had never met Harold Rhodes.

Nathaniel had mailed him an invitation in March and never heard back.

A second man climbed out behind him, carrying a leather briefcase.

I knew that tall man.

He had served me an injunction in the Rhodes lobby for Trevor Langley, and he had stood there while my lawyer took it apart.

"Isn't that Trevor's lawyer?" I said under my breath.

"Was," Harold said, who had good ears. "I hire the best of whoever loses to you, Miss Winslow."

He came up the grass between the chairs, and sixty people turned their heads to follow him.

In the front row, Patricia stood up in her blue hat.

Near the back, the older detective, who had come in a wrinkled suit, put down her paper plate.

"This ceremony cannot continue," Harold told the officiant.

He took a thick packet from the lawyer and held it out.

"Rhodes Family Holdings, the family charter. Section Fourteen."

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