Chapter 13: The Gala

The Hartwell Foundation gala was held in the same ballroom where my children had read a DNA result to three hundred people.

Rafe's mother had the carpet cleaned. I noticed because I kept looking at the floor.

"You don't have to stand up there," my mother had said that afternoon, zipping me into the navy dress.

"I want to."

"Then stand up straight and don't look at the chandeliers."

Daphne arrived at eight, in green velvet, on her father's arm.

Her mother and an aunt followed, and the four of them took table two, where the Marsdens had always sat.

She didn't look at me. She smiled at the donors who nodded to her, and her left hand was bare.

She still thinks she can talk her way out, I thought.

At nine Rafe's mother tapped the microphone.

"My son has something to say," she said. "I told him he has five minutes. I expect he'll take ten."

There was a little laughter. Rafe came up the steps in the charcoal suit and stood with both hands on the podium.

"Six years ago I asked the woman I loved a question," he said. "Is it even mine."

Four hundred people went still.

"She was holding an ultrasound of our three children when I asked it. I didn't look at her face. I didn't look at the picture."

He nodded at the screen behind him.

A photograph came up. It showed me laughing, in a man's arms, with the top of a doorway cut off above us.

"I was given three of these," Rafe said. "I believed them over her."

The screen split.

Next to the cropped photograph was the whole one. A man in a white coat. A clinic sign over his shoulder that read Suite 4.

"The man is her obstetrician. It was the day she learned she was carrying triplets. Someone cut off the coat and the first letter of the sign."

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Hid Your Triplets, Why Did They Crash Your Engagement from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.