The Night Before We Got Married novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Statement

"Yes," I said. "I'd like to."

The courtroom was full on the second Monday in December.

Reporters on the back benches. The whole company of The Glass Sisters in two rows, in their good coats, the man who played our father at the end with his hat on his knees.

Goldie sat on my left. Briggs sat on my right in a suit that was tight across the shoulders.

He'd borrowed it from his captain.

Desmond sat alone in the last row. His own sentence had come down the week before: three years of probation, and two thousand hours of community service on the burn unit at the county hospital.

He'd start in January. Mopping floors, the paper said. Pushing carts.

Delphine came in through a side door in a beige county sweatshirt.

No makeup. Her honey-blond hair was pulled back with a rubber band.

She looked smaller. She looked twenty-nine.

She looked at the benches and found me, and her mouth went thin.

The judge was a heavy, tired man with reading glasses.

"Ms. Tilney," he said. "You may address the court."

I stood up.

I'd worn a plain black dress with no sleeves, and I didn't put a cardigan over it.

I walked to the lectern. I had a sheet of paper. I didn't look at it.

I looked at her.

"Delphine," I said.

She didn't look away. I'll give her that.

"We shared an apartment on Franklin Avenue for two years. I bought you a cake every March. You borrowed my coat and my lipstick and my lines."

The courtroom was dead quiet.

"On the night of the fire, I was in Dressing Room B running Act Two. I heard something outside the door. I thought it was you. I said your name."

Her chin moved, just slightly.

"Then the door got hot."

I held up my left arm, so the judge could see it from the bench.

"I spent seven weeks in the burn unit. I had four surgeries. I wore long sleeves for seven years, in July, at the beach, in my own bed."

Goldie made a small sound beside the bench.

"You got the trial that was meant for me, and everything that came after it."

I put the paper down on the lectern.

"I'm not here to ask for a number. The judge will pick the number. I'm here so you have to hear me say it, in a room full of people, the way I had to hear you."

"You set that fire. You latched me in. You walked away."

"And I lived."

I went back to my seat.

Briggs took my hand under the bench and didn't let go.

The judge asked Delphine if she wanted to say anything.

Her lawyer put a hand on her arm.

She shook it off and stood.

"Everyone always liked her better," she said. Her voice was flat, not breathy at all. "She came from nowhere and she got everything. I just wanted one night."

Then she turned and looked straight at me.

"And you still got everything."

"Yes," I said, from my seat. "I did."

The judge took his glasses off.

"Ms. Sorrell. This court has read your book, and it has read your ring data. Only one of them is true."

He sentenced her to twelve years.

She didn't cry. She didn't look at Desmond. She didn't look at anyone.

The officer took her out the side door, and it shut, and that was the last time I ever saw her.

The theater was dark that night.

Mondays always were.

Briggs had a key. He'd never given it back after the sprinkler job, and nobody had asked.

We let ourselves in through the red stage door at ten.

The only light on the whole stage was the ghost light, a single bare bulb on a stand, left burning so nobody falls into the pit in the dark.

Our footsteps sounded huge on the boards.

I walked to center, where I'd stood at the open call with my left side to the house.

Eight hundred empty seats looked back at me.

"You're doing your thinking face," Briggs said.

"I'm doing my happy face. They're the same face."

He came and stood in front of me in the yellow light of the one bulb.

He still had his captain's suit on. He'd loosened the tie.

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