Chapter 16: The Speech

Janet let the word on the screen do its work for a full ten seconds.

Then she began to talk.

She spoke softly, with her free hand pressed to her heart, and she was very, very good.

"Twenty-four years ago I took a child into my home," she said.

"I fed her, I dressed her, and I loved her as my own.

Last week she went to a laboratory with a family of strangers and came back with a document."

She let the room feel that.

"A document that says she belongs to them."

Two hundred people looked at me.

I sat in the chair beside Hannah with my hands in my lap and did not move.

Dean leaned against the wall at the back with his arms folded.

He looked like a man holding a door shut with his back.

"I have the lab's name," Janet said.

"I have the invoice.

The eldest of those brothers paid for the result he wanted.

They are a trucking family with a grudge, a dead father and a lawsuit they lost."

"We won," the boxer said, loud and clear, from the wall.

A few women gasped.

Janet did not look at him.

"I do not say this with joy," she said.

"I say it as a mother, and as the chair of a Fund that has saved four hundred children's hearts.

My name has stood for something in this town for twenty years.

I will not let a forger take it."

A scatter of applause started at the back.

It was the sponsors' tables, one man and then another.

I saw the reporter at the side camera lean in.

I felt a hand on my elbow.

The surgeon had come up behind my chair, and bent so that only I could hear.

"Wait until she gets to the part about never harming anyone," he said.

"Why?"

"Because I want the room to hear the lie and the truth back to back."

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