Chapter 20: The Stage Steps

Tobias's POV

I had stood at the foot of those steps and told myself I would not move.

Darcy had set the terms. She decides, and I ask.

I stood in the silence with my hands at my sides and watched Conor cross the stage.

He came fast, with his face white, and his hands out in front of him.

My sister was holding the microphone.

She did not step back.

She did not flinch or lift her cane.

She turned her body a quarter turn, away from him.

It was only a small movement.

It was enough.

Conor's hands closed on the empty air where she had been.

His momentum took him past the lectern, and the edge of the stage, which he had never once looked at, came up under his feet.

He went off the front.

He landed on the nearest round table, face first, in front of the white-haired chairman of my board, and the table went over.

Glasses broke.

Three plates of lamb and the whole centrepiece went across the carpet, and a bread basket rolled to a stop against a banker's shoe.

Conor lay in the spilled sauce with his tuxedo torn at the shoulder.

For a moment, nobody in the ballroom made a sound.

I walked down the aisle.

I did it slowly, because my knees were shaking, and I did not want the room to see it.

The chairman had stepped back from the wreck of the table with his napkin still tucked in his collar.

"Mr. Hallett," he said.

"Yes."

"Is this young man still on our payroll?"

"He is suspended," I said. "Without pay."

"Then I would like to propose, now, in front of everyone here, that he not be."

A voice at the next table said, loud and clear, "Seconded."

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