He Gave My Seat to His Sweetheart, So I Went Home and Said My Name novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Gown
Weston hands her seat and her mother's gown to Penelope, sure the orphan has nowhere to go; Marisa takes the microphone, says the name Pallotta and ends the engagement in front of 140 guests.
Weston asked me to take off my dress in front of his mother.
Not in a bedroom, and not as a joke.
He asked in the powder room of his family's lake house.
A hundred and forty guests were laughing on the other side of the door.
"Penelope spilled wine on hers," he said.
"It's a disaster, Mari. Be a good sport."
I looked at the woman beside him.
Penelope Ames stood there in a red-stained blue gown, with her hands pressed to her chest.
Tears she hadn't shed yet shone in her eyes.
She was his childhood sweetheart.
He had dated her at seventeen and kept her at every party since, and he called her his oldest friend.
"I'm sure you understand," Penelope said in her baby voice.
I understood perfectly.
The dress I had on was my mother's.
It was ivory silk with a low back and tiny pearl buttons.
She had worn it to her own engagement party in 1996.
It was the only thing of hers I had taken when I left home at twenty-two.
Weston knew that.
I had told him the night he proposed, and he had kissed my hand.
"Wear it for me," Weston said.
"For tonight, she needs it more."
"And my seat?" I asked.
My seat was at the head table, beside his, with a small card that said Future Mrs. Kincaid.
Weston winced.
"Penelope can have the seat too. It would look strange for her to sit at the back."
His mother, Claudia, had come in behind us and shut the door.
She wore pearls and a silver bob that never moved.
"Marisa, dear," she said.
"Be sensible. Where would you go?"
She said it kindly.
"You have no one," Claudia said.
"No parents, no cousins, no home to run back to. We are the only family you've got."
"That's why you'll do the right thing," Weston added, and he took my elbow.
He had told them all that I was an orphan.
I had told him that myself, four years ago, when he asked about my family on our third date.
It was the cover I had chosen when I came to Chicago under my mother's maiden name.
It had worked for four years.
Until tonight, I had never minded how well it worked.
I reached behind me and undid the pearl buttons one at a time.
Nobody spoke.
I stepped out of my mother's dress in a white silk slip and held it out.
Penelope took it from my hands.
"Thank you," she whispered, and she smiled at Weston.
Weston smiled back.
I picked up my clutch from the marble counter.
In the inside pocket was a cheap black phone that I had carried for four years without once using it on purpose.
It had one number saved.
I had called it twice before, in the dark, and hung up both times.
This time I let it ring.
It was answered before the first ring finished.
"Marisa," Massimo said.
His voice had not changed at all.
"Come and get me," I said.
"Where are you?"
"Lake Forest. The Kincaid house."
"Don't move," he said.
"I'm twelve minutes away."
I hung up and walked out of the powder room.
I went down the hall in my bare feet and my slip, and through the double doors into the ballroom.
A hundred and forty people turned and looked.
There was a string quartet and a champagne tower and a banner that said Weston and Marisa, Forever.
Someone dropped a fork.
I walked straight across the floor to the little stage where the band had been.
I took the microphone off its stand.
"Good evening," I said.
"I'm Marisa, the guest of honor."
Weston came through the doors behind me with his mother, his face going red.
"Mari, stop it."
"For four years, I told you I was an orphan," I said to the room.
"That part was almost true."
Weston stopped walking.
"My mother died when I was twelve. My father died two years ago. My name isn't Pethick. It's Pallotta."
The quartet stopped in the middle of a bar.
I saw a man in the third row set his glass down very slowly.
He was a judge, and he had been to a Pallotta wedding in 2011.
I saw Claudia's pearls rise and fall.
"Salvatore Pallotta was my father," I said.
"I grew up in the house on Astor Street. I walked away from it at twenty-two, and I never told you why, Weston, because you never asked."
"Marisa," Weston said, and his voice cracked.
"That isn't funny."
"It isn't a joke."
I took the ring off my finger.
It was a two-carat solitaire, and I'd always thought it was too small for my hand.
I dropped it into the flute of champagne in Weston's hand, and it sank with a little flash.
"I'm ending the engagement. Tell everyone to keep eating."
The doors at the far end of the room opened.
Cold air came in, and then two men in dark coats.
Then a third man behind them, taller than both.
He was thirty-five, broad through the shoulders, with short black hair and a scar across the back of his left hand.
He crossed the ballroom without hurrying, and the crowd opened in front of him like water.
He didn't look at Weston or at Claudia.
He looked at me, and at my bare shoulders.
He looked at the small cut on my lip where I had bitten it in the powder room.
Massimo took off his black overcoat and put it around me.
His thumb touched my lip, once, very lightly.
"Who did that?" he asked quietly.
"I did," I said.
"I bit it so I wouldn't scream in there. Take me out of here."
My knees felt weak, and it wasn't from the cold.
Weston lunged and caught my wrist.
"You're not going anywhere with a thug," he hissed.
"You have nowhere to go."
Massimo's hand closed over his, slow and heavy.
"Let go," he said, "or I take the hand."
Weston let go.
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