One Last Call Before Goodbye novel · Chapter 3 of 16

Chapter 3: The Gala

The sisters go to Washington so Colleen can see Clifford once, and Sabrina takes the microphone to name her as the woman who sold him.

The line went quiet.

Cynthia had hung up.

Louise took the phone out of my hand and set it face down on the bed.

"She can't do that," she said.

"She just did."

"That salon is eleven years of my life, Coll."

"I know. I'm sorry. I won't call him again."

Louise looked at me for a long time.

Then she flipped the phone back over and started typing.

"What are you doing?"

"His girlfriend gave us her name," she said. "People who text like that always have a public account."

It took her less than a minute.

Sabrina Holt.

Public relations director, Whitford Memorial Hospital.

Her profile was all white teeth and glossy hair.

A rooftop bar. A charity run. A hand on a man's shoulder in a hospital hallway.

Louise zoomed in.

It was Clifford.

He was thinner in the face than I remembered.

He wore glasses now, thin steel frames.

He wasn't smiling in the picture, but he wasn't pulling away either.

The newest post was a photo of a ballroom ceiling full of crystal.

"Saturday night at the Whitford Foundation gala. We have a little announcement. Cliff, you know what I mean."

There was a ring emoji after it.

I handed the phone back.

"Well," I said. "Good for him."

Louise kept scrolling.

"Tickets are five hundred dollars. The Harrow Hotel, Washington."

"Lou."

"She said don't call him," Louise said. "She didn't say don't look at him."

"She bought your building."

"She put in an offer. And if she wants my two chairs and my leaky sink that badly, she can have them."

She got up and started packing the pharmacy bag into my tote.

"You want to see him one last time? Then you're going to see him. Not on a phone. In a room."

"I can barely climb our stairs."

"Then I'll carry you up the hotel ones."

We took the train down on Saturday afternoon.

Louise paid for everything out of the salon account.

I watched her do it and didn't say anything.

She had the same look she got when Dad tried to pay for her beauty school.

She did my hair in the hotel bathroom.

She pinned it up so the thin patches wouldn't show.

She put me in her one good black dress and took it in at the waist with safety pins.

I looked in the mirror.

The dress hung off my collarbones.

My face was mostly eyes.

"You look beautiful," Louise said.

We both knew that wasn't true.

We went down anyway.

The ballroom at the Harrow was gold and white, with round tables and tall flowers and a string quartet in the corner.

Everyone was in black tie.

I felt every one of them look at my shoes.

I found a spot by a pillar near the back.

I didn't need to get close.

I just needed to see him.

It took me four minutes.

He was standing near the stage, in a charcoal suit, talking to an older man with a cane.

He was listening the way he always listened, with his head tipped down and his whole face paying attention.

He laughed at something the man said.

I hadn't heard him laugh in five years.

Louise's hand found mine.

"Okay?"

"Okay."

It was enough.

I could go home now.

I really believed that.

Then a woman in a cream silk gown crossed the floor toward the stage.

Silver-blonde hair. Pearls.

Cynthia.

She stopped beside a tall girl in a green sheath dress and touched her arm.

The girl turned, and I saw the face from the photos.

Sabrina.

Cynthia leaned in and said something in her ear.

Then she lifted her chin and looked straight across the whole ballroom at me.

She didn't look surprised.

She looked like she'd been waiting.

Sabrina followed her gaze.

Her eyes found me by the pillar and went up and down my borrowed dress.

"Lou," I said. "We should go."

"We just got here."

"Lou. Now."

Sabrina walked up the three steps to the stage.

The quartet stopped in the middle of a bar.

She tapped the microphone with one finger, and the sound thumped across the room.

"Hi, everyone. Sorry. I know the speeches aren't until later."

People laughed politely.

Clifford looked up at her with a small frown.

"Before we get to our big news tonight, I just have to point out that we have a very special guest."

She smiled right at me.

A spotlight operator, not knowing any better, swung the light toward the back of the room.

It hit me full in the face.

Three hundred heads turned.

"That's Colleen Duffy," Sabrina said sweetly into the microphone. "The girl who sold Cliff to his mother for two hundred thousand dollars."

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