Chapter 5: The Gala (Revisited & Expanded)
The memories of that night hit me with a new, agonizing clarity as I stood in the center of the Ridgeback Athletic Club ballroom.
I was wearing a high-necked navy silk dress that felt like armor. The sapphire ring was a heavy, secret weight against my chest. My phone buzzed in my clutch. A text from Wade, up in the president’s suite: Two more handshakes. I’m coming.
My mother had maneuvered us to Table Two, practically pressing us against the lip of the stage. “Face the stage, sweetheart,” she had purred, her eyes glittering with a predatory anticipation. “You will definitely want to see this.”
I watched Alyssa take the podium. I watched her flawlessly deliver her thank-yous. I watched her read the line from her index card.
“And of course, my little sister Mary… still waiting for someone to pick her.”
When the laughter exploded, when my father barked his approval, when my mother patted my hand under the table, I didn’t smile. For the first time in my miserable, compliant life, I refused to absorb their poison to make them comfortable. I just sat there, my face an impenetrable mask of stone, staring straight into Alyssa’s panicked eyes. She faltered. The joke had landed, but the target hadn’t bled.
“And now,” Alyssa stammered, recovering her poise, “Please welcome Coach Wade Larkin.”
The double doors swung open. It was exactly 7:04 P.M.
Wade stood framed in the doorway, a towering silhouette in a charcoal suit. He didn’t smile for the cameras. His eyes scanned the sea of four hundred faces and locked onto mine with the intensity of a sniper.
Alyssa glided down the center aisle, a vision in emerald silk, her arm extended to claim him, to walk him to the head table where she had illicitly placed a name card that read Alyssa Grissom-Dale.
Wade began to walk. The room fell into a hushed, reverent silence. As he reached Alyssa, she leaned in, her smile blinding.
“Evening, Alyssa,” Wade rumbled, his voice carrying in the quiet room.
He didn’t break stride. He walked straight past her outstretched hand like she was a mannequin in a department store window. He hooked a sharp left, abandoning the aisle, abandoning the head table, and strode directly toward Table Two.
He stepped behind my chair. I felt the heat of his large hand settle onto my bare shoulder. A collective gasp rippled through the ballroom.
He leaned down, his mouth brushing my ear, his voice a low, fierce growl designed to carry to every person sitting at my parents’ table. “Honey. Are you ready to go?”
Then, he straightened to his full height. He held out his hand to me, his palm open, directly in front of my mother’s horrified face.
The silence in that room was absolute. It was the sound of a bomb detonating in a vacuum. You could hear the ice shifting in Hal Brewer’s bourbon glass. In the aisle, Alyssa’s hand slowly wilted to her side, the blood completely draining from her face. She looked like she was going into medical shock.
My mother, a master of survival, laughed loudly, a hysterical, shrill sound. “Oh, Coach!” she cried out, clapping her hands. “You are just such a good sport, playing along with our little family joke!”
Wade looked down at her. His eyes were like chips of flint. “No, ma’am,” he said, his voice dropping into a register of pure, icy menace. “I am not playing.”
My father’s face was a mottled, apoplectic red. Every eye in the Ridgeback Club was locked on me.
I reached around the back of my neck. My fingers, steady from years of performing delicate vascular surgery, found the gold clasp. I slid the chain free. I let the sapphire ring drop heavily into my palm. Slowly, deliberately, I slid it onto the ring finger of my left hand, where it had belonged for five months.
I placed my hand in Wade’s.
My mother lunged, her manicured fingers digging into my wrist like talons. “Sit down, Mary,” she hissed, her voice a demonic whisper. “Sit down right now.”
I looked at her claw-like grip. Then, with absolute, terrifying calm, I peeled her fingers off my flesh as if removing a parasitic tick. I stood up.
Wade and I walked toward the front of the room. As we passed my sister, standing frozen and trembling in the aisle, I paused for exactly one second.
“You could have just asked me, Alyssa,” I said quietly.
She didn’t look at me. She was staring down at the small white index card shaking in her hand.
By the time we reached Wade’s truck in the parking lot, my adrenaline crashed, and my entire body began to violently shake. Wade pulled me across the console, burying his face in my hair, murmuring apologies into the dark.
My phone began to detonate in my purse. Call after call. Text after text. By eleven o’clock, I had eleven missed calls from my mother. Not a single voicemail.
But at the very top of my screen sat a text from Alyssa, sent at 10:12 P.M.
How long have you been lying to me?
Lying? I had told my mother the truth at Thanksgiving. I had begged for peace in December. The one person I had never explicitly lied to was my sister. I sat in the darkness of my kitchen, staring at the glowing screen. If Alyssa truly believed I was the liar… what, exactly, had my mother told her? And who had written the joke?
