My Fiancé Butt-Dialed Me Mid-Affair, So I Married His Brother novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Second Microphone

The Lathrop Foundation Gala was held in the same ballroom where I had played a recording a week before.

The chandeliers were the same.

The two hundred faces were the same, and half of them looked at me as I came in on Hayes's arm.

I wore the navy gown from the engagement party.

Hayes wore a black suit that finally fit him.

Kendall was not with us.

She was upstairs in the sound booth, with a technician who had been told she was my cousin.

"Smile," Hayes murmured. "They're counting teeth."

"Where's Brandon?"

"I don't know."

We walked down the long carpet, and the room parted.

At the front, under a banner with the Foundation's gold crest, Constance stood with a glass of champagne.

She wore pearls and a pale gray gown.

Beside her, in a tuxedo, a hand clamped on his elbow, stood Brandon.

His lip was split.

His eyes found mine and slid away.

"Friends," Constance said into the microphone. "Thank you all for coming."

She had a gentle, carrying voice.

"This has been a difficult week for my family. A young woman my son loved has chosen to make a spectacle of him. She has married my stepson in a courthouse, for reasons you can imagine, and she has paid her closest friend to seduce him."

A murmur went around the ballroom.

I felt Hayes's arm go hard under my fingers.

"Brandon has agreed to tell you the truth himself," Constance said. "Darling."

She nudged him forward.

Brandon stood at the microphone with his hands shaking.

"She told me what to say," he said.

The room went quiet.

Constance's smile did not move.

"I mean," Brandon said, "that I'm supposed to say that Joanna paid Kendall. She wrote it down for me. I'm supposed to say I was the victim."

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