Chapter 20: The Awards Dinner

The Drake's ballroom had forty round tables, and Lakeshore had filled every one.

I wore a dark green dress that Kat had called "the color of an unpaid bill, but expensive."

Wyatt stood beside me at the door in the too-short suit with a white carnation in the lapel, which Kat had pinned there herself.

"You can still leave," I said.

"I'd rather not."

"There will be a lot of people looking at us."

"Let them," he said, and offered me his arm.

Table one sat directly below the stage.

The chief executive was already at it, with the board chair, a thin man with a silver tie, and two directors I had never met.

Monique sat across from me with her hands folded, very straight, in the green wrap dress she had worn to the party.

"I wanted them to see it," she told me quietly. "The same dress."

Kat came in last, wearing a black jumpsuit and a headset around her neck, and dropped into the chair next to mine.

"Booth is ready," she said. "My cousin says the clips are queued, and that he has never in his life been this happy at work."

At the head table across the room, Cory sat between two vice presidents.

He wore a black tie, and he looked rested.

His mother sat at his right in her pearls.

When he saw me, he lifted a glass and nodded at me, pleased.

"He thinks he's winning," Wyatt said, very low.

"He's about to propose."

"God help him."

The salad came and went.

Awards were handed out to a woman in compliance, a man in the mailroom who had worked there thirty years, and a team from Dallas.

Each time somebody went up to the stage, I looked at the clock on the far wall, because it gave my hands something to do.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Stopped Fighting For My Husband and He Panicked from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.