Part 6
The applause continued as Grant kissed Natalie.
I looked at the ground beneath my chair. A small oak leaf, still green, lay folded along its center. People rose behind me, chairs scraping against the grass.
Leonard came to stand beside me after the couple walked back down the aisle.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m here.”
He accepted the answer.
The photographs took an hour. I stood where I was asked to stand and put an arm around my daughter. Grant thanked the photographer for being patient, then asked whether we could take one more picture with the whole family.
There were only three of us.
At seven, dinner began in the tent.
The floor had been laid over the grass, chandeliers suspended from the supports, and tall arrangements placed where nobody’s view of the head table would be blocked. Natalie had worried about that detail for weeks.
Now I could see her from almost every seat.
The band played while the servers moved among the tables. People spoke over one another, pleased with the evening. A board member told me the ceremony had been exactly right.
I asked whether his wife was enjoying dinner.
Across the tent, Miriam was checking her phone. Frank stood near the audiovisual station, where the screen remained rolled up behind the small platform.
At the head table, Grant leaned close to Natalie. She nodded without looking at him.
The first dance began shortly after eight.
They had chosen the song Arthur and I used at our own reception. I recognized it from the opening notes, though I had not listened to it willingly in years.
Natalie had asked permission to use it. I had told her she didn’t need permission.
Now she rested her cheek near Grant’s shoulder while he held her at the waist. His hand stayed too firmly against her back. She moved when he moved, and the guests watched with the indulgence people bring to a new marriage.
The empty chair beside me had been set aside for Arthur.
As the song ended, I placed my napkin on the table.
At eight twenty-five, the emcee called my name.
I carried the three handwritten pages with me.
Walking to the platform, my calves were stiff from standing for photographs. One shoe caught briefly at the edge of a floor panel. I corrected my step and went on.
The microphone was lower than I needed. I adjusted it myself.
“Thank you for coming,” I began. “Some of you have traveled a long way. Some of you have known Natalie since she was small enough to sleep through a room full of adults arguing about business.”
A few people laughed.
“Thirty-five years ago, Arthur held her for the first time and announced that she had his eyes. She immediately objected to something, very loudly. I told him she seemed to have inherited his opinions too.”
The laughter grew warmer. Natalie smiled at me.
“On her first morning at kindergarten, she asked whether I could stay just outside the door. I told her I would be nearby. Then I went to the car and discovered I wasn’t nearly as brave as I had pretended.”
At a table near the front, an old friend nodded.
“When I picked her up, she had already organized two other children into a game she said needed better rules. By the end of the week, she had decided she might like to run the country.”
I looked at Natalie.
“She has never lacked ideas.”
Her smile trembled.
I told them about her graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, the honors she had earned, and the afternoon she asked to join the company without being given a job designed around her surname.
“She made herself useful before she asked to be important. The people who worked with her knew the difference.”
Leonard was looking down at his folded hands. Grant put his hand over Natalie’s.
“Watching her become capable has been one of the great privileges of my life,” I continued. “So has loving her when being capable wasn’t enough.”
Natalie dabbed at her eyes.
I stopped long enough for the room to settle. The pages lay on the podium. I had not turned the first one over.
“Arthur and I built our marriage on the understanding that neither of us would use the other’s trust as an opportunity. We made mistakes. We disagreed. But neither of us had to fear what the other might do when our attention was elsewhere.”
Grant’s smile thinned.
“After he died, I promised Natalie that I would keep our family and the company together. For fifteen years, I have tried to honor that promise.”
I let my hands rest on the sides of the podium.
“On Thursday, I learned that people I trusted were preparing to use that trust against me.”
A fork touched a plate somewhere in the tent.
Then I nodded to Frank.
He lowered the screen.
Several guests turned in their chairs, expecting a photograph or a family video. The projector came on, and an email filled the space behind me.
Grant looked toward the audiovisual station.
I read the sender, the recipient, and the date.
“Grant Sutton to Warren Kessler at Carrick Consulting. April fourteenth of this year.”
A board member near the front leaned forward.
“The attachments contain our client information and financial records,” I said. “The message offers additional material when an acquisition is confirmed. It instructs Carrick to send five hundred thousand dollars to Northcross Holdings.”
Nobody laughed.
Grant stood.
“Elaine, we need to talk.”
“We’re talking now.”
“This is confidential company material.”
“Yes. It was.”
He looked toward Natalie, then back at me.
“You don’t understand what you’re putting up there.”
“I understand who sent it.”
People were reading the enlarged message. One of our directors took off his glasses, wiped them, and put them on again.
Grant started toward the platform.
Two security men moved into the aisle. They did not touch him. They stood where he would have to stop.
“Please return to your seat,” I said.
“This is absurd.”
“The documents are already with the investigators.”
That made him hesitate.
He went back to the head table.
Natalie had risen too. She was looking between the screen and Grant, as though one of them might provide a different explanation.
“You sold it?” she asked.
Grant reached for her arm. She moved away before he could take it…
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