Chapter 11: Live

Brooke snatched the phone off the tripod, and her face was the color of paper.

"It's just my close friends," she said. "It's just, it's only a few people."

Her husband turned the screen toward himself and read the corner of it.

"Eleven hundred," he said. "There are eleven hundred people watching, Brooke."

She stabbed at the button to end it, and her thumb missed twice.

Nobody else at the tables had moved.

I sat with my father's hand beside mine and waited for the room to turn on me.

For five years I had believed the same thing: that people stayed close because I never made a scene.

I had just made the biggest one of my life, in front of the whole beach, and I waited to be left alone with it.

My mother did not get up.

My father did not get up.

Brooke's husband pulled a chair around the end of the table and sat down beside me without saying a word.

"That's a lie," Colin said.

He stood with his hands open, and the envelopes lay on the table between us.

"Mom, she's upset. She's exaggerating. Yes, I had a rough patch, but I've always provided for this family, and you all know it."

His hand rose to his nose, touched it, and dropped.

Gail was staring at that hand.

She had raised him, and she had to know the gesture.

"Colin," she said. "Is it true?"

"Mom."

"Did they let you go?"

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