The Pen Pal Who Turned Out to Be My New Boss novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: Gala
Dear Hallie,
If the evening goes badly, here is what I want on the record. You were right about the name, the terms and the ferry. I would rather lose this beside you than win it alone.
M.
She slid that note into the pocket of my green cardigan while Robin fixed my hair.
We were in a hotel coat closet on Fourth Avenue, forty minutes before the doors opened.
The ballroom was gold and loud, with a string quartet and a hundred round tables.
The whole of The Lantern was there in its best clothes.
Thirty-one of us stood close together near the bar.
I wore the cardigan over a black dress my mother had hemmed with her own hands in the back of her shop.
Marguerite wore a plum suit, the color of her lipstick, with her gold hoops.
She stood by my side with a glass of water and did not touch me.
In the cab she had asked if she could read one sentence of mine from the stage.
I had said yes, and my one term was that she look at me when she said it.
"Seven twenty," Robin whispered. "He's already got the microphone."
Gordon stood at the head of the room beside the dessert table, in a tuxedo, with his gold watch on the outside of his cuff.
Beside him stood the two women from Brightline.
Beside them, a little apart, stood a woman in a dark green dress with silver hair cut straight at her jaw.
I had never seen her before.
"His sister," Marguerite said, low. "Forty percent. She hasn't been in the building in six years."
"Is she on our side?"
"She hasn't said."
At seven thirty the quartet stopped.
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