When He Finally Chose Me I Was Gone novel · Chapter 28 of 32
Chapter 28: One Note
I did not say a word to the room.
I put the whistle between my teeth, as I had under the truss, and blew one long note.
It went out over the round tables and the white cloths, and it rose into the gold ceiling and came back.
Three hundred people sat with their forks in their hands and listened to it.
On the stage, Soren shut his eyes.
His shoulders came down, and he stood there with the microphone held out and the sound going through him.
When it ended, I lowered my hand.
"That's what he heard," I said. "A year ago, in the smoke. And twenty-three years ago, in the water."
My voice shook, and the microphone carried it anyway, because someone at the sound table had turned me up.
"I was ten," I said. "I got sent home on a bus for it. I never knew he lived."
A woman near the front put her napkin to her mouth.
At the head table, Astrid stood up.
She did it slowly, with one hand flat on the cloth, and the whole room watched her.
She had not put her hands over her ears this time.
"I was nine years old," she said.
It was a small voice, and it was meant to carry.
Nobody answered.
Then, from a table near the dance floor, a heavy man in a gray tuxedo said, not very loudly, "You were nine for a long time."
Someone laughed, a short ugly breath of a laugh, and stopped.
Soren turned a page on the stage.
"The second page is the audit," he said. "It's short."
The screen changed to a column of figures.
"Five thousand dollars a month, for nine years, coded as a family honorarium out of my mother's discretionary account, with a bonus every August. The payee is Astrid Maddox. The description is rescuer's retainer."
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