Chapter 16: The Stair Camera

The stage was lower than it looked, and the lights were hot.

Felicity held the microphone against her chest, still smiling.

I did not take it from her.

I stood in front of her with my hands at my sides, and the room could hear me without it.

"You asked where I was the night you fell," I said.

"I did."

"I was in my room with the door shut, reading."

A few people laughed, short and unkind.

"I heard a crash," I said. "I opened the door and you were at the bottom, and Philip was running."

"You were screaming at me," Felicity said, tearful. "You said-"

"I was twenty-three. Nobody has ever heard me scream."

Someone near the front coughed.

"As for my daughter," I said. "She is Douglas's. She has his chin and she has my mother's mother's hair."

I turned to the room.

"Anyone who wants to know can swab her cheek. Douglas will take a test in this ballroom tonight."

"I don't need one," Douglas said from the foot of the steps.

His voice carried.

"I looked at her once on a doorstep and I knew."

He glanced at Felicity.

"I'll take a test anyway, if it makes this woman sit down."

Felicity's smile stayed up, but her fingers had gone white on the microphone.

"It's easy to bring a paper to a family who wants you back," she said.

"Then let's talk about papers," said Philip.

He had come up the steps beside me.

He took a small black drive from his breast pocket and held it where the room could see it.

"At nine this morning I opened the camera system in the old house," he said.

"It recorded to a server in the cellar, and in four years nobody ever looked."

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