Chapter 16 - Before the Music Stopped
The recording was ugly in a way Sloane's wedding photographs could never be. My mother stood by the stairwell door adjusting her corsage. Sloane came toward her in silk, furious that I'd asked about the emergency-lodging invoice.
"She saw the receipt," Sloane hissed. "She'll call her little accountant friend."
"Then get her away from here," Mom said. "We only need the weekend."
"I'll make her leave."
"Don't do anything stupid."
Sloane's face hardened. "She always makes you choose."
The two women separated. Thirty seconds later I walked into frame, holding a wedding program, and my sister followed me toward the stairs. The shove happened at the edge of the picture, followed by the sound of my body striking the first steps.
No triumphant speech. No confession dramatic enough to undo the injury. Just a few ordinary sentences spoken by people who expected to get away with them.
I sent the original file through the evidence process Detective Price requested, with its timestamp and the contact information of the person who preserved it. Nia and I sat together in silence afterward.
Sunday morning I stayed in my hotel room. I iced my knee and read a message from one of our emergency placement coordinators about a family reunited after an evacuation. At eleven, my phone rang. It was Theo.
"I told her," he said. "With my brother and her parents there. She denied the payments, the ring, everything. Then she said the push was your fault because you frightened her."
"Are you safe?"
"I'm leaving now. My family knows the ceremony is canceled."
Half an hour later, guests began posting photographs from Whitcomb House. The ballroom was dressed in white roses. An expensive cake sat untouched. Theo's grandmother's empty ring box was on a table beside a short handwritten note: THERE WILL BE NO WEDDING TODAY. PLEASE RESPECT OUR PRIVACY.
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Then a video surfaced of Sloane standing in the doorway, screaming that I had stolen her husband.
At the end she pointed into the camera and shouted, "Merritt did this because she knows what happened to the money before it ever reached the wedding!"
