Chapter 21: The Stage

Chet's POV

I climbed the steps to the stage with my father watching my every move.

He had his hand out, palm up, as he had held it out in a hallway when I was nine.

I did not take it.

I stopped at the microphone.

Four hundred faces looked up at me, bright and curious, in the gold light.

June stood at the foot of the steps with her arms at her sides.

She didn't nod, and she didn't smile.

She only looked at me and waited to see who I was.

At the back of the hall, by the kitchen doors, a woman in a green coat sat very straight.

I had spent twenty years being afraid of this exact moment.

I opened my mouth, and the first thing I heard was my own voice, warm and even and certain, and it was his.

I let it be.

"My father asked me to tell you who put this in your heads," I said. "I'll tell you. He did."

A sound went through the room.

"Chet," my father said, softly.

"Roxy," I said, without looking away from the crowd. "Now, please."

At the sound desk a red-haired woman hit a key.

The big screen behind us lit.

It showed a page of neat, upright handwriting with dates down the left side.

"That's my father's notebook," I said. "I took it out of his locked suitcase in the guest wing."

I looked at him.

"The code is my mother's birthday. He never changed it."

Nobody in the ballroom made a sound.

"Nineteen years ago, a widow with a shipping line. Eleven years ago, a woman he'd dated in college."

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