Chapter 19: Four Hundred Witnesses

"Mom!" Shea cried. "Mom, tell them! She's lying, she's edited all of it!"

My mother stood up from the front row.

She laid the green and gold quilt over the back of her chair, very carefully.

Then she walked to the altar, and the whole terrace watched her do it.

She was a small woman in a cardigan, and she stopped a foot in front of her daughter.

"Shea," she said. "Look at me."

"Mom, I can explain."

"Look at me, and not at the camera."

Shea's eyes slid sideways to the red light.

My mother put a hand on her chin and turned her face back.

"Did you take your sister to a mountain and leave her there?"

"It was a joke."

"Answer me."

"It was Jared's idea," Shea said. "And the members voted, Mom, it's a whole thing, it's content, it's how I pay for your roof."

It came out of her in one breath, and the terrace heard all of it.

My mother let go of her chin.

I had watched her take Shea's side in a thousand arguments in our kitchen.

I watched her not do it now.

"I believed you at the villa," she said. "I said, poor Shea, she's worried. And Melinda was standing in the kitchen with a sunburn."

"Mom."

"You cried in that parking lot, and I'd have sworn it was real."

Her voice shook, and she kept going.

"I will not tell you it's all right, Shea."

"I raised you both in the same house, and you learned the wrong lesson."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Fiancé Erased Me, Then Left Me for Dead from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.