Chapter 21: The Microphone

Lydia's POV

Benton gave the toast the way he gave everything, warmly and with his hand on his heart.

"Friends," he said. "Four years I've stood up here and raised a glass to my wife's family."

Applause, polite and wet.

"This year has been hard. Some of you have heard things."

He let his voice thicken.

"I want to say in front of every one of you that I love Lydia McAlister. I have made mistakes. I'm asking tonight for the chance to make them right."

He turned and held his glass out toward my table.

Three hundred heads turned with it.

I stood up.

I walked down the long aisle in my mother's dress, and nobody coughed, and the band stopped playing in the middle of a bar.

Benton's smile held, and I watched him decide it was a reconciliation.

He opened his arms.

I climbed the steps, took the microphone out of his hand, and said into it, "Thank you, darling. I'd like to add something."

He laughed, once.

"Lyddie."

"Please sit down."

He didn't sit.

Cosimo, at the back of the room, lifted one hand toward the booth, and the big screen behind me went white.

The first thing on it was a bank statement with a balance of four hundred and twelve dollars and eighteen cents.

"That was my mother's trust," I said. "It held eleven million dollars last month."

A murmur.

The second slide was a page with fourteen transfers, and fourteen signatures, and a date in March beside the last.

"That's my name," I said. "Fourteen times. I was in Lisbon the week of the last one. I have the boarding pass."

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