My Husband Left Me in Labor for My Best Friend and Her Baby novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Envelope

The Founders' Gala filled the Lakeshore Club ballroom with three hundred people in black and silver.

Chandeliers hung over the tables, and a band played soft jazz in the corner.

I wore the only dress that still fit over my stitches.

Ward wore a suit of my father's that was too wide in the shoulders and too short at the wrist.

Nobody looked at the suit.

They looked at him, and they looked at me, and they whispered behind their glasses.

Norm took the table nearest the stage and set the diaper bag under his chair.

Posy slept against my chest in the wrap.

"You don't have to do this," Ward said, quietly.

"I know."

"If it's wrong..."

"Then I apologize on that stage like I promised."

"It won't be wrong."

"You can't know that."

"No," he said. "But I held him."

At the front table, Brent sat in a black tuxedo between his mother and an empty chair.

Summer came in late with the baby.

She wore a gray dress and no makeup, and she walked slowly to the front table.

She did not look at Ward.

Brent's mother took the microphone at eight.

The room settled.

"Friends," she said. "Members. Thank you for coming on a very special evening for the Bozeman family and for our town."

She smiled at three hundred people, and I saw the polish she'd had for forty years.

"We've all been through a difficult time. There has been a great deal of gossip, some of it from people who should know better."

Her eyes found me and stayed.

"Tonight we put an end to it."

She held up a cream envelope.

It was sealed with a gold sticker, and she raised it to the light.

"A private laboratory has tested the infant, Brent, and a second man, who came into our community last week claiming a connection. I told my son this was the only dignified way forward."

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