“This morning,” I said, “Mr. Blackwood explained what my father meant.”
In the third row, Blackwood stood up slowly. He was in a dark suit, silver hair neat as always, legal folder in hand. He looked less like an attorney in that moment than a stage manager waiting for his cue. His face was composed, but I’d known him since I was twelve. There was satisfaction tucked into one corner of his mouth.
Becca turned half around. “Grant,” she whispered, and though the microphone didn’t catch it, the church was so quiet I heard every syllable. “What is she talking about?”
Grant wouldn’t look at her.
The stained glass above the altar spilled a deep red stripe across the floor near his shoes. It looked almost biblical. Or maybe I was just angry enough to start assigning symbolism to architecture.
I lowered my eyes to the second sheet in my hand.
“This isn’t how I wanted to honor my father today,” I said, and that part was true enough to ache. “He deserved peace. He deserved a room full of stories about the people he helped, the races he won, the impossible number of stray teenagers he somehow convinced to love sailing and college applications in equal measure.”
My throat tightened. I swallowed hard.
“But my father also believed that truth delayed becomes truth weaponized. He hated secrets that fed on silence. And he was very clear with his attorney about what he wanted read in public, in front of witnesses.”
Grant made a sound then, a half-choked, half-angry noise.
“Natalie, don’t,” he said.
That was when I knew, finally and absolutely, that whatever came next was going to hurt him more than the affair had hurt me.
I looked at him over the podium and felt something inside me settle into place. Not peace. Not yet. But shape. Structure. A spine where there had been collapse.
“Would you like to know what it says, Grant?” I asked.
His face lost what little color it had left.
Mr. Blackwood took one step into the aisle, opened the folder in his hands, and nodded at me.
That was when Becca let go of Grant’s hand.
And that was when I realized she didn’t know the real reason he’d brought her there at all.
Part 3
I had always thought revenge would feel hot.