Chapter 2: The Name on the Second Wristband
For one long moment, nobody moved.
Then Juliette did something no one expected.
She laughed.
It was a short, sharp sound — cold and deliberate.
She straightened her spine, lifted her chin, and looked Caroline up and down the way a person looks at something they stepped on by accident.
"You look terrible," Juliette said.
"Whatever you think you have in that folder, it won't matter.
Not in this room.
Not today."
Caroline didn't flinch.
"Douglas," she said, turning slowly toward the groom.
"Tell her what you told me.
Three years ago.
The night before the fire."
Douglas Mercer said nothing.
His face had gone completely still — not calm, but frozen.
The kind of frozen that comes right before a collapse.
"Douglas." Caroline's voice dropped lower.
"Tell her.
Or I will."
A woman in the front row stood up suddenly.
She was older, silver-haired, dressed in dark blue.
She had been sitting quietly through everything.
Now her hands were shaking.
"I knew," the woman said, loud enough for the whole room to hear.
"I knew you were alive.
He made me sign something.
He said if I ever—"
"Sit down, Mother." Juliette's voice cracked like a whip.
The older woman didn't sit.
She looked at Caroline with eyes full of something that had been locked away for years.
Detective Vance opened the briefcase.
Inside were not just documents.
There were photographs.
May you like
And a second wristband.
This one had a different name on it entirely.
