Part 4
Denise told me Brooke tried to draw Nolan toward another table, but he didn’t follow. Around them, people had begun repeating the news in lowered voices.
The former wife had inherited a fortune. The groom had hurried to marry his secretary. Guests who knew very little about our marriage suddenly thought they knew the most important thing about it.
I stared at the garden below the balcony. Vernon hadn’t meant to hand my private life to a roomful of strangers, but intention didn’t make it private again.
“Was that the end of it?” I asked.
“Oh, no.” Denise’s voice rose. “Vernon kept going.”
He had moved, she said, from praising my grandmother to complaining about people who married for money. His companions were still listening, and now several neighboring tables were listening too.
Then he mentioned the groom.
“He actually said Nolan’s name?”
“He referred to him as the fellow getting married. Then he told them about running into Russell at the bank.”
Russell was a vice president in the lending department, an old acquaintance of Vernon’s, and a business contact of Nolan’s company. According to Vernon, Brooke had visited the branch the previous week and complained loudly enough to make her own affairs public.
Denise took on Vernon’s booming delivery again.
“‘Girl thought she was marrying a man with deep pockets. Turns out she had to send him five thousand dollars herself just to keep the wedding bills moving. Went on about it right there at the counter.’”
I shifted forward in the chair.
“Brooke said that?”
“Russell heard her. Vernon said she was furious. That she’d thought she was getting a rich boss and instead had one more person asking her for money.”
The room had gone quiet around their table. Nolan stood holding a champagne glass while Brooke tugged at his sleeve.
“Come on,” she had whispered. “We don’t need to listen to this.”
But Nolan had turned toward her.
“Who else have you been telling?”
She tried to smile. “It’s a joke. He’s confused. Let’s keep moving.”
Denise’s pleasure faltered slightly as she described what followed. Her husband had been close enough to see Nolan’s hand shaking.
“You went into a bank and told strangers I needed your money?” Nolan demanded.
“Please lower your voice.”
“After everything I’ve spent on this? After what I’ve—”
He stopped before completing the sentence. He couldn’t say aloud that the inheritance he had just heard about had mattered more to him than the wife he had dismissed.
He kept closing his fingers even as the bowl cracked. When he finally let go, glass fell from his bleeding palm and red spots spread through the champagne on Brooke’s skirt.
She screamed and stepped away.
“You made a fool of me,” he shouted. “All this time, and you’re laughing at me behind my back.”
I looked at my own hand, resting safely against the edge of the chair. I knew Nolan’s temper. I had seen slammed doors and heard him tear through a room with words. Denise was describing something beyond anything I had witnessed.
“What did people do?”
“They backed away. My husband said nobody knew where to go at first.”
Nolan swept an arm across the nearby champagne display. Glasses fell against one another and broke. Then he overturned a serving table, scattering platters of seafood and food onto the ballroom floor.
Guests hurried backward, knocking into chairs. His parents ran toward him.
His father caught at his shoulder.
“Nolan, enough. You have to stop.”
Nolan shoved him away.
Brooke stood several feet from him, one side of her gown wet and marked by the spilled food. The elaborate skirt that had photographed so beautifully now trapped her between a chair and the fallen table.
“And the baby?” Nolan shouted. “Am I supposed to believe that too? Or was that another story to get what you wanted?”
That question traveled through the room as quickly as the news about my inheritance had. People began whispering that the pregnancy might be invented. Brooke heard them.
Her frightened expression hardened.
“You don’t get to stand there and call my child a lie.”
She moved toward him, and he struck out with the back of his hand, pushing her away. In her high heels, she stumbled backward and hit her abdomen against the corner of a decorative table before falling.
I stood up so abruptly that the chair scraped behind me.
“Was she hurt?”
“She was holding her stomach and crying.”
“Denise, was somebody helping her?”
“People were going toward her. Her parents were there. Nolan stopped for a second.”
Whatever I thought of Brooke, I couldn’t listen to that as entertainment. If there was a baby, it had made none of the decisions that had brought them into that room.
Then Russell approached.
He had heard his name in Vernon’s story and seen the commotion. Instead of letting the subject drop, he chose to confirm it in front of the guests.
“Mr. Mercer,” he said, “I was in the branch. I heard what Miss Dalton said.”
Brooke was still clutching her middle.
Russell continued. She had complained about Nolan being short of cash, he said. She had told people about sending him five thousand dollars.
“You can check the account record,” he added. “I brought a copy.”
Denise said people leaned forward as he took out the document. They no longer had only Vernon’s drunken account to consider; the bank officer had brought evidence.
Denise’s husband said Nolan looked from Russell to Brooke and then toward the guests, as though searching for somebody who still saw him the way he wanted to be seen.
He didn’t find that person.
Nolan went to the head table and heaved it over. The tall wedding cake slid sideways and collapsed, frosting spreading across the cloth and onto the floor.
“Leave!” he shouted. “All of you. Get out…”
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