Eight Months Pregnant, My Husband Locked Me in a Freezing Cabin for His Ex on Christmas Eve novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Play It Loud

Hallie's POV

I walked up the center aisle in a server's apron with four hundred people watching.

My legs were shaking, but I made them keep going.

Nobody stopped me.

The woman from the newspaper had her phone up already.

"Hallie, dear," Joyce said into the microphone, in the gentlest voice she owned. "You've come. Someone please help her. She's not well."

A man in a security blazer started toward me from the side.

"Touch her," Eli said, behind me, "and I'll know your name."

The man stopped.

I reached the foot of the stage.

"I had a baby on Christmas morning," I said. "In a cabin on Larch Ridge. In a house your hostess owns, with the heat off, the phone cut, and the door bolted."

"Security," Joyce said.

"I'd like you to watch something first," I said.

I looked toward the back of the ballroom.

The sound man pressed a key.

The sixteen-foot screen behind Joyce went dark.

The slideshow of her life had been running on it all night, forty years of ribbon cuttings and cabin keys.

It froze on a picture of Joyce shaking a governor's hand.

Then it changed.

A grey night-vision image came up, as tall as the wall.

Snow falling on a porch.

A car's lights swung across the trees.

A woman in a camel coat climbed the steps and stood at the window with her hands at her sides.

Four hundred people looked at Joyce, and then at the screen, and then at Joyce again.

Joyce was wearing a camel coat in the picture.

She had worn it to court.

The sound was clear and huge.

*"No. She's still inside. She's broken one pane. The windows are triple, she won't get out. I'll wait for the pains. She'll be easier to explain if she's already in labor."*

Someone in the front row said, "Oh, God."

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