They Sacrificed Me to Avoid Favoritism novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Answer

The ballroom was so quiet that I could hear the microphone breathing.

"My name is Lindsey Howland," she said. "I'm seventeen. My birthday is March third."

Nobody moved.

"I'm going to show you what Mr. Salcedo has said to me for eight years. Please watch the screen."

My father spun toward the back of the room, where the booth sat above the last row of tables.

Last time, he had cut the power on me.

This time the booth belonged to the hotel, and a hotel employee stood in its doorway with his arms crossed.

He looked at my father and did not move.

The huge screen woke up.

It showed the lawn at Brightwater, shot on a parent's phone.

A paramedic held up the wrist of a girl with swollen lips and a red band.

It was me, and I made myself watch it.

On the screen my father took off his jacket and put it around Lindsey's shoulders.

"You skipped breakfast again, didn't you?" he said, loud enough for the whole ballroom to hear. "You go gray when you do that. Stay where you are, sweetheart."

Somebody in the audience made a small, shocked sound.

"He never said that to Marisol," Lindsey said into the microphone. "Not once, in sixteen years. He said it to me."

The clip ended. The screen went dark for a second.

Then it filled with a hospital photograph.

It showed a young man in a green sweater holding a newborn, with a look nobody in the room had ever seen on him.

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