My Fiancé Butt-Dialed Me Mid-Affair, So I Married His Brother novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Fall

Nobody in the ballroom spoke while the video ran.

Two hundred people watched a man in a green cardigan reach for his chest.

They watched Constance stand in the corner of the frame and not move.

A woman near the front put both hands over her mouth.

A man at the back of the room started to say something and stopped.

Hayes stood beside me with the microphone down at his side.

He did not look at the screen, because he had already seen it.

He looked at Constance.

On the screen, the clock in the corner turned over its ninth minute.

Then the picture went dark, and the lights over the ballroom seemed too bright.

"That's a forgery," Constance said.

Her voice came out thin and high, and her hand was shaking on the stage rail.

"It's an edit. Hayes has made it. My husband died of a bad heart in his study, and I held his hand."

"You didn't," said Brandon.

He had not left the stage.

He stood a step behind his mother with his split lip and his rumpled tie, and he looked ten years older than he had a week ago.

"Brandon," Constance said. "Sit down."

"I was in the doorway."

"You were a boy."

"I was twenty-one. And you took his pills out of the drawer that morning and gave me the bottle to throw out."

A sound went through the crowd.

It was not a gasp.

It was lower than that, and it came from everyone at once.

"I carried it to the bin by the garage," Brandon said into the microphone he had taken from Hayes. "It had his name on it. I've thought about that bottle every day for eight years, and I told myself it was nothing."

"You are confused," Constance said.

"I was confused." His voice broke. "I'm not now."

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