Chapter 21: Play It

I held the microphone out to him, and he took it.

He pressed it against his chest and said nothing at all.

"He can't say it," I told the crowd, from the foot of the stage. "So I'll let somebody else."

I looked up the length of the green to the sound table.

Hank lifted one hand.

The banner behind the stage went dark, and the big screen above it flickered.

"Don't," Owen said, into the dead air. "Libby, don't."

The screen lit with a living room I had seen once on a phone.

A sofa, a glass, Owen's face tilted and slack.

It was forty feet wide.

"Is it on?" said Owen's voice, from every speaker on the green.

Three hundred people turned their heads, one way, and then the other.

The Owen on the screen was laughing.

The Owen on the stage had stopped.

"I got my results this week," the big Owen said. "It's me, Dee."

A woman near the front said, "Oh my God," quite softly.

"And Libby thinks it's her."

A small boy asked his mother something, and she put her hand over his mouth.

"Let her," said the voice. "She's so good at being sorry."

Somebody in the crowd made a sound that was not a word.

I did not look at the screen.

I had seen it.

I watched the people instead.

I watched a man in a fishing cap take it off.

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