Chapter 5: Eleven Seconds

"How?" I said.

Marcello closed the laptop and slid the drive across the steel to me.

"In November you asked me what time I got home from Chicago the night Eli died."

"I asked once."

"You never ask me anything, June. You asked that, and you looked at me like I was a door you couldn't open."

His voice stayed low.

"I knew then that somebody had given you something."

"And you let me walk down that aisle with it."

"Yes."

He didn't dress it up.

I had been ready for a lie, and the plain yes went through me like cold water.

"Why?"

"Because I wasn't going to take it from you."

His eyes didn't leave mine.

"If I took it, you'd have spent your life wondering what was on it."

"So you let me carry a bomb into your mother's chapel."

"I let you choose."

"Then why didn't you move?"

I hadn't known I was going to say it.

It came up out of me, hard and raw.

"My friends stood up in front of a hundred and ten people and voted me out of my own wedding."

"Gwen Kinsella walked up the aisle in a white dress. And you stood there."

"June."

"You froze, Marcello. You stood there and looked at the doors."

"I know what I did."

"You didn't look at me once."

"No."

His hands closed on the edge of the steel.

"Gwen's father came up the mountain with a dozen men," he said.

"Four of them were at the side doors when the poll came up. Two were behind your friends."

"One stood at the back of the chapel with a rifle case I didn't like."

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