Chapter 20: The Annual Meeting

The annual meeting was held in the same hotel ballroom as the gala.

There were three hundred donors in the chairs this time, and the champagne tables had been cleared away.

Darius stood at the lectern as interim chair, with the ledger pages on a screen behind him.

I sat in the front row beside my mother.

She wore her church dress and held her handbag in her lap with both hands.

A woman in a gray suit sat alone at the back.

Darius had told me who she was.

She was an investigator from the attorney general's office, and she had been given a seat by the aisle.

Cornelia came in at ten past two.

She wore navy and pearls, and her silver hair was set.

She walked down the center aisle alone, with her lawyer three steps behind.

Some of the donors rose half out of their seats.

Some of them looked away.

"As a founding member," she said at the lectern, "I am entitled to speak before the vote."

"The bylaws say you are," Darius said, and stepped aside.

She turned to face the room.

"Friends," she said. "I have spent nine years of my life building this Foundation, because I believe in second chances."

"I lost my husband, and I nearly lost my younger son."

"I decided that no mother should have to stand alone."

A few of the older women dabbed their eyes.

"A campaign of cruelty has been waged against me this month by a young woman with a grievance."

She did not look at me.

I stood up in the front row.

"The young woman has a name," I said. "It's Nadine Corwin. I said it to the police at two in the morning, and I'm saying it to you."

Cornelia's mouth tightened, and I sat down again.

"They have taken a charity's accounts and twisted a mother's kindness into a crime."

"I will not apologize for loving my son."

There was a smattering of applause from the left side of the room.

It stopped when the double doors at the back opened.

Brinley walked down the aisle.

She wore a plain gray dress and no jewelry, and her hair was pulled back.

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