Chapter 6: The Number
I stopped walking.
My father was two steps ahead before he noticed.
He turned.
"Nora?"
I held up the phone.
He read the message.
His expression didn't change much — a slight tightening around the eyes, the way it did when he was processing something he hadn't anticipated.
"Do you know this number?" I asked.
"No."
"But you know what it means."
He was quiet for a moment too long.
"Dad."
"Come sit down," he said.
We found a small table near the kitchen pass-through, away from the remaining staff.
Someone had left a bread basket and a water pitcher.
My father poured two glasses and set one in front of me.
"The recording," he said.
"I told you I made it by accident.
That Paul called from my study while I was in the next room."
"Yes."
"That part is true.
I was in the next room.
I did hear the call." He wrapped both hands around his water glass.
"What I didn't tell you is that I wasn't alone."
I waited.
"Derek was with me."
I set my glass down.
"Paul's best man."
"He'd come to see me.
Two days before the wedding.
He said he needed to talk to me privately, away from Paul." My father looked at the table.
"He told me he'd been trying to find a way to warn you for weeks.
He didn't know how to do it without proof.
When he heard Paul on the phone that afternoon, he was the one who said we needed to record the rest of the call."
"Derek," I said again.
I was rearranging things in my mind — Derek's toast about loyalty, Derek staring at the tablecloth, Derek leaving without a word to Paul.
"He gave me the recording on a drive the next morning.
He said he couldn't stand up there and be Paul's best man if you didn't at least have the chance to know the truth before you signed anything."
"Why didn't he just come to me directly?"
"He said he was afraid you wouldn't believe him.
That you'd think he was causing trouble.
He thought it would carry more weight coming from your father." A pause.
"He may have been right."
I thought about that.
I thought about Derek's face when he'd walked out — the expression I hadn't been able to read.
Shame and sorrow, I'd thought.
But it wasn't shame.
It was the face of someone who had done the only thing they could think of and still felt like it wasn't enough.
"I need to call him," I said.
"I thought you might."
I looked at the message on my phone again.
*You should ask your father who gave him that recording.
It wasn't made by accident.*
"This isn't Derek's number," I said.
"No."
"Then who sent this?"
My father was quiet.
"Dad.
Who else knew?"
He set his water glass down carefully.
"Amanda," he said.
"Amanda knew Derek had gone to me.
Paul told her, apparently, after Derek came to the house.
Paul thought Derek was just worried, that he'd talked himself out of it.
He didn't know about the drive."
I looked at the message again.
"Why would Amanda warn me?" I said.
"She was with Paul.
She's been with Paul for eighteen months."
"I don't know."
"She sat in that room.
She let the toast happen.
She let him blow her a kiss in front of me and two hundred people."
"I know."
"And now she's texting me from an unknown number telling me to ask questions?"
My father had no answer for that.
He looked, for the first time all evening, genuinely uncertain.
I stared at the message.
*It wasn't made by accident.*
Five words that didn't change anything about tonight — the recording was real, the annulment was signed, Paul was gone.
But five words that meant the story I thought I understood had a door in it I hadn't opened yet.
I typed back one word: *Why?*
The three dots appeared immediately.
Then they stopped.
Then the number went silent.
I put the phone face-down on the table.
"She'll either answer or she won't," I said.
My father nodded.
From the kitchen, I could smell something warm — roasted something, herbs, the kind of food that had been kept at temperature for hours waiting for a reception that never properly happened.
"You said you were hungry," my father said carefully.
May you like
"I am," I said.
But I left the phone face-down on the table, and neither of us mentioned it again that night, and I lay awake until nearly three in the morning thinking about a woman in a champagne-colored dress who had watched everything happen and then, at the very end, sent five words into the dark.
