Chapter 2 — Six Hundred Witnesses

The officiant was talking again.

Josie could not read a word of it. Her eyes had stopped working properly — not blurry, worse than blurry, unfocused, the way a camera goes soft when somebody knocks it. The man's mouth moved and it meant nothing. It was just meat.

I'm the one who asked for you.

Her mother had said he has never looked at you. Her mother had said it forty minutes ago with her hands on Josie's chin.

So one of them was lying.

Somebody nudged her elbow. The officiant was waiting. The whole building was waiting. Six hundred people, and she had missed her cue, and the silence was going strange and hot.

She turned her head three inches.

Her mother was in the second row, and her mother's lips were moving, small and fast and only for her.

Prison. Prison. Prison.

Over and over, like a prayer, like a lullaby.

"I do," Josie said.

Her own voice went out of her and disappeared. It always did. She had no idea if it had come out loud enough or if it had come out at all — she only knew it had landed, because the officiant's shoulders dropped an inch and the room exhaled at once and the air got lighter.

Julian took her left hand.

He did it carefully. He turned her palm and slid the ring on, and it went on too easily, because it had been sized for a woman with narrower fingers.

Then he did not let go.

He held her hand a beat longer than the ceremony needed. His thumb settled on the inside of her wrist and pressed, and stayed, and Josie understood with a small cold shock exactly what he was doing.

He was counting her pulse.

She looked up at him. He was already looking down at her. He did not look away and he did not apologize.

His mouth moved, and he shaped it for her, and it was two words.

"Still here?"

She should have said something cutting. She had six or seven good ones stacked up.

"Yes," she said.

"Good."

The reception was a long slow mauling and she had to smile through all of it.

Here is what a ballroom is like, when you cannot hear:

It is four hundred mouths and you cannot read more than one at a time, so you choose. You pick a face and you burn your whole attention on it, and while you are doing that, the rest of the room is talking about you, and you know it, because you can see it in the way heads tilt together and eyes come sideways and then snap away.

You learn to pick the right faces.

Josie picked the ones who thought she was furniture.

"—the other one, apparently," said the elegant woman in gray, who had been introduced to her nine minutes earlier as Regina Sterling, and who had not once spoken directly to her since. Regina had a way of turning her chin so her words dropped neatly into the ear of the man beside her. "The plain one. There were two, you know. Julian appears to have been given the receipt instead of the gift."

The man laughed.

Josie kept her face perfectly still and drank her water.

Then a senator's wife in yellow came at her from the left, took her arm, leaned in, and spoke straight into the side of her head.

Josie waited.

The woman leaned back, eyebrows up, waiting for an answer.

"I'm sorry," Josie said. "I didn't catch that. Could you say it to my face?"

The woman blinked. Then her expression did a thing Josie had watched happen perhaps two thousand times in her life — the little flick of embarrassment, immediately converted into being wounded, and then, at speed, into being offended.

The woman said something to the man beside her as she walked off. It was three words and it was easy.

Rude little thing.

Josie stood at the edge of the ballroom in her sister's dress, married ninety minutes, and read every cruel thing in that room off six hundred mouths, and smiled, and drank her water.

Nobody here had the faintest idea what she could do.

That was the first useful thing she had noticed all day.

Her sister's name was in one out of every four conversations.

Vanessa. Where's Vanessa. Somebody said Vanessa was ill.

Josie went out to the corridor and tried the number again. She watched the screen. Nothing came back. She tried Vanessa's building manager and got a voicemail icon.

Her hands were doing something strange. She looked down and found she had been folding and refolding the note from the mirror, which she had taken off the glass and put in the bodice of the dress without deciding to.

I'm sorry, Josie-bug.

Wrong loops. Wrong slant. Somebody had sat down with a pen and taken their time.

"Josie."

She looked up.

Her mother had a glass of champagne in each hand and a smile on that was nailed into place at the corners.

"Put that away," Diane said. "Someone will see."

"Who wrote the note, Mom?"

"Vanessa was frightened. Girls get frightened." Diane pushed one of the glasses at her. Josie didn't take it. "It's done, Josephine. Look at me — it's done and nothing happened. Not a word. Not a single word out of him."

"He knew."

Her mother's smile shifted.

"He knew," Josie said again. "Before the veil. He was waiting for me."

For a second — one second — her mother's whole face went loose and blank, and Josie saw something underneath it that she had never seen there before and could not name.

Then Diane turned her head away, and the conversation ended, because that is how conversations end with Diane Rourke.

At the bar, a man in a gray suit was leaning on the brass rail.

Josie noticed him for no good reason. He was the only person in the room not looking at the bride.

Beside him stood an older man she had shaken hands with an hour ago. Heavy shoulders, silver hair, a handshake like a closing door. Crawford Vale, somebody's chief something. He had smiled at her with enormous warmth and then, while she was still standing there, turned to the man on his other side and said she's not going to be a problem, and had not once considered that she might get that.

Now Crawford Vale leaned toward the gray suit and put his glass down and spoke.

He did not cover his mouth. Rich men never cover their mouths.

Josie stood forty feet away with a glass of water in her hand and read it clean.

"—the Rourke girl changes nothing. Wednesday still goes."

The gray suit said something short.

And Crawford Vale said, "Then he learns about it Thursday, like everyone else."

Josie did not move.

She had been married ninety minutes. She had a stranger's ring on her finger and a dead man's nickname folded against her ribs, and now she was standing in a ballroom holding something that had never been meant to leave that bar.

Wednesday.

Across the room, Julian Sterling turned his head and looked straight at her.