Three, Two, One, I'm Gone novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Nobody Said Go

I turned my back on them and walked out.

I did not look at Paige.

I did not look at Grant.

I crossed the whole ballroom with a hundred and twenty phones turning to follow me, and I did not look back once.

Behind me nobody called go.

Grant and Paige stood where I had left them, with their arms at their sides, frozen as they had been trained to stand.

I stopped in the doorway to the hall.

Wade came up beside me and did not say a word.

Opal rose from her gold chair and leaned on her cane.

"The caller has left," she said. "Nobody has said go."

Nobody in the ballroom answered.

"I am the judge," Opal said. "The round ends when I say it ends, and until then anyone who moves has lost. I'd like everyone to remember that I said so first."

She walked slowly across the floor and stopped in front of Grant.

He stared over her head with his eyes wet.

"Eleven years ago I buried my son," Opal said. "The day we put him in the ground, you went into my bedroom and took my husband's gold watch from the top of my dresser."

Grant's lips parted.

"You pawned it in Pittsburgh for the deposit on a flat. I know, because I asked at every shop in that city."

"Gran," Grant said.

"I never needed the watch. I needed you to come back and say you took it. I waited eleven years for a phone call, and I got a video of you on the courthouse steps."

"Gran, I was nineteen, I was so scared," Grant said.

"You moved," said Opal.

A hundred and twenty guests made one low sound.

Grant stood with his mouth open and his hands out in front of him.

"You moved first, and I saw it, and so did everyone here," she said. "Now you keep to the stakes. Stand up straight and tell it."

His whole face crumpled.

"I took the watch," Grant said. "I took it out of your dresser. I pawned it for my first month's rent, and I never told Wade or anyone."

His voice went up, cracked, and came back down.

"I told Delia my family was dead so she wouldn't meet anyone who knew. I let Paige take her necklace and her charm and her mother's brooch. I took eight hundred dollars from her every month for three years for a rent that Wade was already paying."

A sound ran around the room, low and ugly.

"I stood on those courthouse steps and let her beg," Grant said. "I watched her. I wanted her to."

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