Chapter 21: The Screen

Nolan's POV

I had been in the hotel's sound booth at four o'clock that afternoon with a lawyer and a man with a lanyard who owned the screen.

Keeley didn't know.

I hadn't told her because she would have said it was too much.

I wanted her to have one thing in that room she didn't have to carry.

The man with the lanyard sat at the back of the ballroom now, with his hand on a laptop.

I caught his eye across two hundred heads and lifted one finger.

Keeley lifted the microphone.

"Thank you for coming," she said.

Her voice was low and clear.

"I'm not sick. I've never been to Cleveland. I've never had a treatment, or a diagnosis, or a day in any hospital that wasn't for a visit."

The room laughed, uncertainly.

Corbin smiled and reached for the microphone.

She stepped back out of his reach.

"What I've had," she said, "is a husband who took my mail for six years."

Behind her, the banner that said Ten Years of Trust went white.

Then the first picture came up on the screen, forty feet wide.

It was a green postal card, a signature on the line marked Received by.

C. Arbogast.

"My grandmother sent forty-one letters," Keeley said. "These are two of them."

The pictures came faster.

A signature card with a name leaning backward, and next to it the same name written three times in a careful round hand.

A promissory note for two hundred and seventeen thousand dollars, with a looped y and a slash through the t.

Then Keeley's real signature, taken from a library form, plain and upright.

A woman at table four said, very quietly, "Oh no."

Corbin took a step toward the stage lights.

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