Chapter 14
She was still in the wedding dress.
Without the tiara.
Her hands were empty.
She looked at him with an expression he had not seen on her face before — stripped of strategy, stripped of management.
Just a face.
"I heard you on the phone," she said.
"Then you know I've been speaking with an attorney."
She nodded slowly.
"Was it you?" he asked.
"Did you send someone to warn me?"
She looked at him for a long moment.
"Does it matter?" she said.
"Yes," he said.
"It matters."
She looked at the floor.
Then back up at him.
"My father built that clause in nine months ago," she said quietly.
"When I first told him I was serious about you.
He said it was protection.
Standard practice." She stopped.
"I thought it was strange.
I didn't fight it.
That's the part I'm not proud of."
"But you sent someone."
She didn't answer.
Which was its own answer.
He looked at her — really looked at her — and felt the particular grief of someone seeing clearly for the first time what they should have seen much earlier.
"Vanessa," he said.
"What did you actually want from this?"
She was quiet for a long time.
"I wanted out of his house," she said finally.
"I wanted a life that was mine." She paused.
"I thought you could be that.
I thought eventually the rest of it wouldn't matter."
"The rest of it mattered," Derrick said.
"It always matters."
She nodded.
She seemed to already know that.
"There are three hundred people in that room," she said.
"What do we do?"
---
## CHAPTER 8: Three Hundred People Waiting
They went back into the ballroom together.
Not side by side at the altar.
Side by side as two people walking through a door they couldn't keep closed any longer.
The room read it immediately.
Whatever hope some guests had been holding onto — that the ceremony might somehow resume, that all of this would be smoothed over and explained away — that hope left the room along with the string quartet's silence.
May you like
Derrick walked directly to his mother.
He knelt beside her chair.
