Chapter 29: Say It Again

Betsy's POV

The Law and Order Dinner was held every year in the VFW hall on the Saturday after the toy run.

There were three hundred people at round tables with paper tablecloths.

At the front was a head table with a podium and a projector screen.

I stood beside the podium in a navy dress, with my husband's hand at the small of my back.

"My wife," Clint said to the sheriff's table, smiling. "She's had a hard month."

"Poor girl," a councilwoman said.

I smiled at her.

My phone was in my clutch with the line open.

In a truck at the curb, two hundred feet away, Brogan was listening to every word.

I had told him to stay there. He had said he would, in the voice of a man who meant it for exactly as long as he could.

Alec sat at a table near the wall in a borrowed jacket.

He had come as Clint's guest. Clint had put him there himself, so that I would see him.

Candace stood at the sound table at the back of the hall, in a black dress, with her bruised lip hidden under makeup.

Her hand rested on the mixing board.

Twenty minutes earlier she had slid the slider for Clint's lapel microphone up to full.

Then she had looked at me across the room and nodded once.

The sheriff, a soft old man with a white mustache, gave his speech and sat down.

"Now a few words," he said, "from the department's best young deputy."

Clint stepped up to the podium to a good round of applause.

He talked about community, and about the toy run, and said people should look past a bad morning in front of a camera.

I stood beside him with my hands folded and my eyes on the back wall.

Candace came up the side aisle with a glass of water.

It was the kind of thing a woman in a black dress would do for her man, and half the room smiled at her.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Cheated With My Cousin, So I Totaled a Biker President's Harley from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.