Chapter 23: The Red Carpet

The Northlight gala filled the lobby of our own tower, under a banner nobody had ever seen.

It was a plain white banner with a single word on it.

NORTHLIGHT.

For the first time in the company's history, the chairman's name was printed under it.

Three hundred guests stood on the red carpet.

They wore black and held champagne, and every one of them had a phone out.

My father sat at the head of the line in a wheelchair with a bow tie on.

The doctors had cleared him for two hours.

He had told them he would go with or without clearance.

"You look like a waiter," he told me.

"Thank you, Dad."

"A good waiter."

Penelope wore deep green.

She had her hair up, and she stood with her hand through my arm and her father on her other side.

He kept touching his own bow tie.

At seven-thirty a black car stopped at the curb.

The deputy marshal got out first.

Then Sonia, in a pale silver dress, with the cuff chained to his belt.

The cameras went off in a flash storm.

Photographers shouted her name, as they had for ten years.

She stopped.

She looked at the carpet and the three hundred guests, and the banner over her head.

Then she saw me.

She walked the whole length of the carpet.

Nobody spoke.

The deputy let her go as far as the chain would reach, and then stopped a few feet from where I stood.

"Wes," she said.

"Sonia."

"I don't have a script."

"I can tell."

She laughed, and her voice broke on it.

"I wrote four speeches," she said. "I burned them all in the car."

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