Second Choice Wife novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Gala

The Garrison Grand sat on a hill over downtown Columbus with every window lit.

It was the company's flagship, and tonight was its fortieth anniversary.

Two hundred guests filled the ballroom under the chandeliers, bankers and board members and their wives, and a reporter from the business paper who kept stepping backward into people.

Heath wore a black tuxedo.

I wore the green dress again, because I had decided never to hide it.

He put his hand on my back in the car, in the elevator and in the lobby.

He didn't take it away once.

Eleanor had made the seating chart.

I found my name at the far end of the head table, between a man who sold carpet and a woman who sold nothing, with a card that read MRS. H. GARRISON.

Bridget's card sat directly at Heath's left.

She had come in a white gown with a low back and a thin gold chain, and she looked like an angel in a church window.

"Oh," she said when she saw the cards. "I don't want to take Naomi's place."

"It's fine," Eleanor said. "It's only for dinner."

Heath looked at the cards.

Then he lifted both, switched them, and pulled out the chair beside him for me.

"Heath," Eleanor said in a low voice.

"My wife sits next to me, Mother."

The woman who sold nothing put down her wine glass and stared.

Dinner was endless.

Bridget told stories about the old days in a soft laugh that carried exactly to the right ears.

The time Heath rode his motorcycle down the school's front steps.

The time he got suspended for painting her name on the water tower.

"He was impossible," she said, with her hand over her heart. "And I loved every minute."

Someone at the table sighed.

Under the cloth, Heath's knee pressed against mine.

I put my palm flat on his thigh.

He covered it with his own.

"Bridget," Eleanor said brightly, near dessert, "you must say a few words. Heath, make her."

"Oh, I couldn't."

"Please," said the carpet man.

She stood, and the table clapped.

She raised a glass and looked down the length of it at my husband.

"To old friends," she said, a tremble in her voice. "And to the one who taught me what love costs."

Her eyes were shining.

There wasn't a dry one at the table.

I felt Heath go cold beside me.

I felt the muscle in his thigh turn to rope.

I sipped my wine and said nothing, because the reporter had finally noticed us and was steering through the tables with his notepad out.

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