My Fiancé and Brothers Left Me at the Altar for My Adopted Sister novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Reception for One Hundred Forty

June takes the microphone at her own reception, faces Kent and her brothers when they arrive to explain, and points out the scrape on Victoria's car is white paint while the stranger's truck is gray.

I did not go home.

I walked into the reception hall next door, still in the dress, with a hundred and forty people coming in behind me.

The caterers had set the tables an hour ago.

The cake stood on its silver stand, five layers of lemon and buttercream, and the little bride and groom on top looked nothing like us.

Nobody knew what to do.

My maid of honor was crying in the doorway.

The band had stopped tuning and was staring at me.

I went up on the stage, took the microphone from its stand and tapped it.

The speakers thumped.

"Hi, everybody," I said. "Thank you for coming."

A few people laughed.

"The wedding is off. I'm sorry you had to watch it. The dinner has been paid for, so please eat it, and take the cake home."

Nobody moved.

"I mean it," I said. "My father would hate for good food to go to waste."

Somebody at the back of the room began to clap.

Then a few others joined in, awkwardly.

The door at the other end of the hall opened.

Kent came in with Dustin on one side and Ross a step behind.

Kent had brushed the dirt off his knee, and he was holding his phone.

"June," he called across the whole room. "Can we talk? Somewhere private?"

"No," I said into the microphone.

It echoed.

His mouth tightened.

"This is humiliating for everyone."

"Yes," I said. "It was humiliating for me for forty minutes, in front of the same people. You can have a minute of it."

"Victoria was being stalked," Dustin said, and he walked toward the stage with his hand out, like I was a child holding a knife. "A man was waiting by her car. You saw what he was."

"I saw three grown men kneeling on someone who wasn't fighting back."

"He has a restraining order against him."

"Then the police can deal with it. They did." I let the room hear me breathe. "I want to ask you something, Dustin. You're good with details."

He stopped.

"What color was the scrape?"

"What?"

"On Victoria's car door. She posted a picture at ten forty. You've seen it, you were already on your way. What color was the paint in the scrape?"

Dustin looked at Kent.

Kent looked at his phone.

"It was yellow," Ross said from behind them.

He had said it so quietly that I wasn't sure I'd heard.

"What?" Dustin said.

"Yellow. A smear of yellow paint." Ross rubbed the back of his neck. "I looked at it in the lot. It's the same yellow as the pole at the entrance gate."

There was a pole at the entrance gate.

I had driven past it myself that morning, a short concrete post painted yellow, with a dent in its side.

"And what color is Mr. Stender's truck?" I asked.

Nobody said anything.

"I'll tell you," I said. "It's gray. I saw it parked at the curb when I went out. A gray pickup with a toolbox in the back."

A woman in the third row, one of Kent's aunts, said, "Oh, goodness," and she wasn't saying it to me.

"That proves nothing," Kent said. "The scrape could have happened anywhere."

"It could have. Then why did she say he did it?"

"She didn't say he did it. She said she was scared."

"Of whom?"

He had no answer for that.

Dustin came up the steps of the stage and put his hand on the microphone stand.

"That's enough," he said in a low voice. "You're going to regret this. You've had a shock. We're going to take you home."

"No," I said, "you're going to leave."

I said it without the microphone.

It carried anyway.

"All three of you. The hall is in my name, and so is the bill. Eat or go."

Dustin's face went red from the collar up.

"June."

"Go and sit with Victoria. She's waiting for you."

For a second I thought he might actually grab the microphone out of my hand, and a hundred and forty people would see.

Kent took his arm instead.

"Leave it," Kent said. "She's hysterical. She'll call us tonight."

"I won't," I said.

They walked out of the hall.

Kent went first, and Dustin went second, and I watched them cross the whole floor under the little white lights.

Ross did not follow them.

He stood just inside the door with his hands in his pockets, looking at the carpet.

At the end of the room, when Dustin reached the door and turned, he saw it.

"Ross," Dustin said. "Come on."

Ross lifted his head.

For a moment my brother looked at me, and at Dustin, and back again, and said nothing at all.

Then he went and sat at an empty table by the wall.

He picked up a fork.

He ate a bite of salad in front of everybody, very slowly.

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