Chapter 19: Guest of Honor

The surgeon texted at four in the afternoon on the twentieth.

I'll stand up after the toast. Once. Then I'm leaving the city for a month.

I showed it to Calvin on the loading dock behind the hotel.

"That's enough," he said. "A man in his position saying it in a room full of donors is enough."

"If he doesn't lose his nerve."

"He won't." Calvin handed me a paper cup of coffee from the cart. "He knows what's waiting if he does."

We had worked out the rest on the back of a takeout menu.

The surgeon would speak after the first toast.

The producer's cousin ran the ballroom sound, and he had Joan's collector tape on a drive in his pocket, with the signed slip scanned beside it.

Calvin would wait behind the kitchen doors, in a rented black jacket, until I came for him.

I would take my seat at table nine with a gold-edged card.

"What if Nolan sees you before the speeches?" I said.

"He won't. I'm the staff."

"You don't look like staff."

He glanced down at the rented jacket, which strained across his shoulders.

"I look like a ranger in a funeral suit."

Keep reading free with an account. Start While I Couldn't Breathe, He Was With Her from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.