The Abandoned Wife novel · Chapter 14 of 24
Chapter 14: Flashbulbs
The guard let go, and four hundred phones came up at once.
Tom stood in front of me with his back to the room, shaking so hard I could see it in his shoulders.
"Dara, go," he said without turning. "Go now."
I did not thank him.
Emil took my hand, Bernadine took my other elbow with the bulldog cane held crossways, and we went down the three steps and up the aisle.
Nobody stopped us.
Behind us I heard Lena say "Tom" in a voice with no lullaby left in it, and I did not turn around.
The hotel doors opened on a wall of flash.
Forty photographers shouted my name, both of them, one after the other.
"Mrs. Kellerman!"
"Ms. Salter, are you saying you faked your death?"
"Did your husband know?"
"My husband was told I was dead by a trooper he never asked a question," I said. "He believed it faster than he should have."
Bernadine's driver had the back door of a black car open.
We climbed in, and the flashes went on strobing against the glass until the corner took us.
My hands had started to shake, now that there was nobody to see.
Emil pulled them into his lap and held them there without a word.
Bernadine's two lawyers were waiting in my lobby with tablets, and they followed us up in the elevator that still smelled faintly of pickles.
The older one read Lena's statement aloud before I had my shoes off.
It had gone out forty minutes after we left the ballroom.
"Ms. Renner regrets that a disturbed individual exploited a night of mourning," he read. "She has been the victim of a cruel hoax by a con woman who has studied Mrs. Kellerman's life. Police have been notified."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of The Abandoned Wife are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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