The Seat They Never Saved and the Offer I Finally Took novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: His Father's Dinner

The retirement dinner was in the ballroom of a country club in Edina, under a banner that said FORTY YEARS OF AMES AND SON.

There were eighty guests, and a screen at the front for a slideshow.

I walked in wearing the green wool coat.

I'd looked at it in my mother's closet for a long time before I put it on.

It was Tobias's coat, and it was mine, and that was no longer a contradiction.

He walked in at my side with Ivy on his other arm, and the room turned.

Somebody near the door said, "That's her."

Somebody else said, "Is that the gray coat guy?"

Connor's mother met us at the head table and took both my hands without a word.

His father stood beside her.

He was a heavy, gray-haired man in a tuxedo, with Connor's jaw and none of his smile.

"Ms. VanderVeen," he said. "My wife tells me you have something to show us."

"After the toast, if that's all right."

"Please."

Connor was across the room, working the tables.

He saw me, and his smile didn't falter.

I had to admire it.

He tapped his glass at the head table twenty minutes later, with his father's retirement cake on a cart behind him.

"Friends, clients, family." He put a hand on his heart. "It's been a hard week."

A sympathetic murmur rolled through the room.

"You've all seen the video. You've seen the harassment my family has taken. And I have to tell you tonight, with my father here, that the woman in that video is not who she seems."

I sat very still.

"Lena VanderVeen lived in my home for three years," Connor said. "She was a guest. And when she left, she took nine thousand dollars from my account, and a ring that belonged to my grandmother, and she let a man I considered my friend turn her against me. A man who, I've learned, had been paying people to manipulate her."

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