Not a Love for Faint Hearts novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: One
The ballroom did not make a sound.
Two thousand people waited, and Imogen stood above them with her signature still wet.
Percy knelt on the marble with his head up and his hands open.
He waited without expecting an answer.
She came down the steps slowly, and the crowd parted her path.
She stopped an arm's length from him.
"Get up," Imogen said.
"Not until you answer."
"Then I'll answer from here."
She heard her own voice and it was calm.
"I said yes once, in a garden, to a man who had asked me a hundred times and meant every one," she said. "You asked me tonight in front of a crowd, with a recording in your pocket and her dress on the stage behind us."
"Yes."
"You don't remember a single one of those hundred."
"No."
"So no, Percy."
A low sound ran through the hall.
His face did not change.
"Ask me when you've earned it," she said.
He breathed out slowly.
"How many times?"
"As many as it takes."
Something in his chest seemed to settle.
"Then that was one," Percy said, and rose to his feet.
Behind them a woman screamed.
"I made him!"
Camille had thrown the dead microphone down, and it rolled across the stage and off the edge.
Her hair had come out of its twist.
"I stood on that lawn when I was nine," she screamed at the room. "I sat through every funeral and every Christmas. I was the one who stayed!"
Nobody answered her.
She looked at the faces, and then at the front row, where Percy's mother stood white and silent and did not move to help her.
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