The Life I Chose novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: After the Gala

For a second Marjorie didn't understand why four hundred people had turned to look at her.

Then she heard her own voice come back off the ballroom ceiling.

Her hand went to the little microphone on her neckline.

She tore it off.

The clip took a thread of midnight blue silk with it.

Holt pulled his sleeve out of her grip and went through the side door without his coat.

Nobody stopped him.

Nobody went after him, either.

On the stage, Holt's father leaned into the podium microphone.

"Thank you, Marjorie," he said. "I think that was the speech."

Somebody laughed.

It wasn't a kind laugh.

Then the room started to move.

Not toward her.

Away from her.

The woman from the cake stand got up from table four and walked out through the main doors with her husband.

The partners' wives went next, in a cluster, without looking back.

The four girls from table nine took their mothers by the arm and left, and their mothers let them.

At the far end of table one, Kendall sat in her wheelchair with the microphone still in her lap.

She was crying without making a sound.

Her father came down off the stage and took the handles of her chair.

"Ten o'clock," he said. "I promised your doctor."

He wheeled her out past her mother.

Marjorie stood alone by table one in her torn silk, with four hundred empty chairs pushed back around her.

The tech man unplugged the laptop.

The screens went blue.

Ruthie handed me a glass of the gala's champagne.

"It's terrible," she said.

"It's a domestic sparkling with a French label," I said. "It's a crime."

"You'd know."

Daniel took my other hand.

He didn't say anything.

He just held it, all the way out to the truck.

On Monday at ten the Foundation's board met in the dining room on Blackstone Boulevard, the way it had for thirty years.

Holt's father asked me to be there.

"They should hear it from you before they vote," he said. "Not from the Journal."

Nine people sat around the long mahogany table.

The cook served coffee and didn't pretend not to listen.

Marjorie came in at ten past, in grey wool and her pearls, with a lawyer in a good suit at her elbow.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Life I Chose from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.