I Was Never One of Them novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: Draw a Card
On Thursday night I pinned my mother's veil over a black dress and went back to the lodge.
I had thought about not wearing it.
Then I thought about Whitney pinning it into her hair, and the room that had laughed.
My mother had washed the lace herself that morning and hung it in the sun.
"Wear it like you mean it," she said, and kissed my forehead.
Rhys waited by the truck in a dark suit that was too tight in the shoulders.
He looked at me for a long time.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing. You're the only person I've ever seen make lace look like armor."
"You're coming in through the front door."
"I've never used it."
"Tonight you do."
The great hall blazed with candles.
There were two hundred donors in evening dress, a string quartet, a long table of silver, and the same stone fireplace where I had been told to hold the camera.
A banner hung over the stage in gold.
*The Lockridge Family Foundation: Eight Years of Looking After Our Own.*
I read it twice.
Rhys's hand tightened on mine.
"Breathe," he said.
"I am."
We stepped through the doors together, and the room noticed.
It happened in a wave.
First the nearest table went silent, then the next, and then the quartet played a wrong note and stopped.
A man near the door whispered, "That's him."
A woman whispered, "That's her."
Phones came up.
I walked down the middle aisle in my mother's veil on the arm of the man the whole county called a killer, and I did not look away from anyone.
The circle sat at the front.
The two couples from the lodge trip stared at me over their champagne with their mouths slightly open.
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