He Sacrificed My Father for His First Love novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: When Did You Know

The ballroom made a sound I had never heard four hundred people make.

It was not a gasp.

It was a low, shared stir, four hundred people shifting in their seats at once.

Rory's mother held the microphone with both hands.

"My name is not on any of your fund pages," she said, "but my face is. I'm sixty-two years old. I was a lunch lady for thirty-one years. Two years ago I had a lump taken out of my chest, and the doctor said it was nothing."

Her voice shook, and she kept going.

"I found out about my cancer last Sunday, from my son, in my own kitchen."

"Mom, stop," said Daphne.

"I never went to Sloan Kettering. I have never taken a pill. My daughter put a picture of me in a bed I was sleeping in with the flu, and she raised three hundred thousand dollars."

Daphne had come down from her seat, and she stood at the foot of the dais with her hands pressed together.

"She's confused," she told the room, softly. "She's been through so much, the medication..."

"What medication?" said Rory's mother.

Somewhere at the back, a man laughed once and then covered it.

I took the microphone gently out of her hands.

She went to stand by Bea at the edge of the dais with her handbag hugged against her chest, and Rory came up the steps and put an arm around her.

Daphne looked at him.

He met her eyes and did not look away.

I turned to the podium.

Domenico stood behind it, one hand on the wood.

I had been married to that man for seven years.

I knew the shape of his shoulders when he was lying, and I knew them now.

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