Chapter 2: The Call Nobody Was Supposed to Hear
The paramedics arrived in four minutes.
Preston didn't move aside.
He stood in the center of the ballroom doorway with his arms crossed, as if the ambulance had come to interrupt *his* evening.
"She doesn't need a hospital," he said flatly.
"She needs discipline."
One of the paramedics — a young woman with steady hands — looked at Sophie's head, then looked at Preston.
She said nothing.
But I saw her jaw tighten.
They lifted Sophie onto the stretcher.
Her little flower girl shoes dangled over the edge.
She was still clutching the white ribbon that had been soaked through.
"Mommy, don't leave me."
"I'm right here," I told her.
"I'm not going anywhere."
My mother caught my arm as I turned to follow.
"If you walk out that door," she said quietly, "don't expect to walk back in."
I looked at her hand on my arm.
Then I looked at her face.
And I felt nothing.
I pulled free and walked out.
What I didn't know yet — what none of us knew — was that a hotel security supervisor had already been watching the ballroom footage on a monitor in the back office.
He had seen Preston slip the phone into Sophie's pocket forty minutes before he ever grabbed the microphone.
And he had already made a call.
Not to the police.
May you like
To someone else entirely.
Someone whose name made Preston go pale when he heard it spoken aloud twenty minutes later.
