Chapter 23: The Rooftop

Nolan's POV

Slade stayed on one knee for three full seconds, with the ring box open in his hand.

Then he stood up and turned around, and I watched him find his smile.

"I'm sorry," he said into the microphone. "A guest is confused. Security, please."

"I'm not confused," said the woman in the wedding dress.

She walked down the center aisle with her train sliding behind her over the rooftop tiles.

Two hundred heads turned to follow her.

"I'm Slade Merrick's wife," she said. "We married at the Milwaukee courthouse six years ago, and I never signed his divorce papers."

"She's unwell," Slade's mother called from the front table, rising on her cane. "She has been unwell for years."

"She looks fine to me," Maggie called from the bar.

The crowd laughed, nervously, and then stopped.

Minnie walked out of the back of the room in her green dress.

She went up the aisle beside the woman in white, and she stopped at the foot of the stage.

"I'm his wife too," she said. "I have the certificate. We married two years ago at the Cook County courthouse."

A man near me whispered, "Two?"

Slade's smile went flat.

"This is a stunt," he said. "My ex-wives are attention-seekers. Delaney, darling, ignore it."

"Wives," Delaney said.

She hadn't moved from the center of the stage.

"Plural," she said. "Slade. You said you were divorced."

"Baby, they're lying."

"Both of them?"

"They're working together." He spread his hands. "They were all paid by that nurse."

I stepped into the aisle.

"That's right," I said, loud enough for the back row. "I paid them with the forty-eight thousand dollars you took out of my account."

The man at the DJ table tipped his hat, and he pressed a key.

The screen behind Slade lit up with a spreadsheet.

Eleven names filled the wall in white type, with dollar amounts in a column, and a column on the right that read Closed.

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