The Mistress in the Room novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Same Screen

I walked up the center aisle in my navy dress with two hundred faces turning to follow me.

The applause died in pieces.

Douglas saw me coming and his arms came down.

"Fran," he said, off the microphone, through his teeth. "Not here."

"Here," I said. "It's the same screen, Douglas. You asked me to come."

I climbed the three steps.

Lydia held the microphone against her chest, and she gave it to me without a word.

I turned to the room.

"Good evening. I'm Fran Lindahl. For twenty-nine years I was married to the man you came to honor."

Nobody moved.

At table three, the roommate set his glass down.

"A few weeks ago, on this kind of screen, you watched my husband kiss a pregnant woman in a hotel ballroom in Boston. Some of you cheered. A few of you are sitting at table three tonight."

Eleven heads at that table dropped.

I lifted my hand toward the control table.

The screen went dark, and then it came up again, and it showed what Lydia had given me.

It was the whole of the Boston evening, not the trimmed clip.

It showed Douglas laughing at a long table with a glass in his hand, and the roommate's red, happy face leaning into the frame.

"To Doug," the roommate said, on the speakers, twelve feet tall on the screen. "To two wives and no worries. Fran will never see it coming."

The recorded Douglas laughed.

"She never does," he said. "She thinks I'm at a wedding."

A few people gasped.

Then somebody at the back made a low, ugly sound of disgust.

I let the file run until the roommate's face had filled the whole screen.

Then I raised my hand again.

The next slide was a page of text, enlarged until it was readable from the back of the room.

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