Chapter 5: How Long She Had Been Waiting
Ryan stepped outside to make the call.
The church doors swung shut behind him and the sound of the latch echoed all the way to the rafters.
Diana stood at the altar rail.
Seth stood three feet away.
She wasn't going anywhere and she seemed to have accepted that, because the urgency had left her posture.
She stood the way someone stands when they've decided the next move belongs to someone else.
I pulled Chloe to the side of the altar, out of Diana's direct line of sight.
"Tell me everything," I said.
"From the beginning."
Chloe pressed her fingers against her eyes for a moment.
Then she dropped her hands and looked at me.
"She called me two nights ago," she said.
"Late.
She said she needed to see me before the wedding.
She said she had something she needed to tell me about you."
"About me."
"She said she'd found something.
Financial records.
She said you had a second account I didn't know about and that you'd been moving money out of the business for the past year." Chloe watched my face.
"I didn't believe her.
But she was crying.
She sounded so scared for me.
So I agreed to meet her this morning before the ceremony."
"Where?"
"The bridal suite.
I was already dressed.
She came in, she hugged me, she said she was sorry, she said she'd been wrong about you and she was so happy for me." Chloe stopped.
"And then she asked me to sit down because she felt dizzy.
And when I sat down she was behind me and she—" She touched the back of her neck.
"Something.
A cloth.
I don't know what was on it."
The word I was thinking, I didn't say out loud.
But it sat in my chest like a stone.
"I woke up in the sacristy," Chloe said.
"Hands tied.
The door bolted from outside.
I could hear the organ playing." Her voice went very quiet.
"I could hear the processional starting."
I turned and looked at Diana across the church.
"She drugged you," I said.
"Yes."
"On your wedding morning."
"Yes."
Diana met my eyes.
She didn't look away.
I walked back toward her.
Seth stayed close.
"The cloth," I said to Diana.
"What was on it?"
"She's fine," Diana said.
"She's standing right there."
"What was on it?"
"Something mild.
Something that wears off in an hour.
She's not hurt."
"You dr*gged your sister on her wedding day."
"I needed her out of the way for ninety minutes." Diana's voice was even.
Reasonable.
The voice of someone explaining a logistics problem.
"She wasn't supposed to wake up until it was done.
The ceremony, the signing, the transfer filing.
By the time she came around we'd have been married twenty minutes and the documents would already be with the county recorder."
"And then what?" I said.
"You thought I wouldn't notice I'd married the wrong woman?"
"I thought by the time you noticed, it would be too late to matter." She tilted her head slightly.
"Annulment takes time.
Contested property transfers take longer.
I had a very good attorney lined up."
"You've been planning this since the will."
"I've been planning this since I watched my father hand Chloe a house and hand me a clock that doesn't even keep correct time." Her voice stayed level but something moved behind her eyes.
"He always said we were equal.
He said it our whole lives.
Equal love, equal value, equal place in this family.
And then he died and I found out what equal actually meant."
"That wasn't Chloe's fault."
"No," Diana said.
"It wasn't.
But the house is still in her name and the clock is still on my mantel."
Chloe had come up behind me.
I didn't hear her move.
"I would have given you half," Chloe said.
"Diana.
I told you that.
The week after the funeral I sat across from you at your kitchen table and I told you I wanted to split everything fifty-fifty."
"You told me you'd think about it."
"I told you I would do it."
"You told me you'd think about it," Diana repeated.
"And then you got engaged and started planning a wedding and stopped returning my calls for three weeks." She looked at her twin with something that might have been grief, if it hadn't been so hardened.
"I stopped waiting."
The church doors opened.
Ryan came back in.
"Twelve minutes," he said.
Diana looked at the door.
Then she looked at Chloe.
"I want you to know," she said, "that I didn't want it to be like this."
Chloe said nothing.
"I want you to know that I love you.
That I have always loved you.
And that I am genuinely sorry about this morning." She paused.
"I'm not sorry about the rest."
"I know," Chloe said.
"That's the part I'll never understand."
Diana picked up the key from the altar rail and held it out toward me.
"Unit forty-one," she said.
"The folder is inside a blue binder on the left shelf.
You'll want it for your attorney." She set the key in my palm.
"I'm not going to make this uglier than it already is."
May you like
I closed my fingers around the key.
Outside, faintly, came the sound of a siren.
