Chapter 7: Harry Calls
She didn't answer it.
The phone rang four times and stopped.
Then it rang again immediately.
"He knows something is wrong," Maya said.
She was talking to herself as much as to me.
"He has people.
At events.
He — sometimes he has people."
"He had someone here?" I said.
"I don't know.
Maybe.
He likes to know what's happening." She looked around the room slowly, as if seeing it differently now.
"He would have wanted to know how today went."
"He sent you here," Adele said.
It wasn't a question.
Maya looked at her.
"He suggested it," she said carefully.
"He thought it would be good for his image.
A family event.
Photos of us together."
"He wanted photographs of you with your daughters," Adele said.
"To use."
"To show that he was — that we were — a normal family.
He's been having some difficulties.
Business ones.
He thought a wedding would look good."
The phone rang again.
"Don't answer it," Patricia said.
Her voice was very calm.
"If he has someone here, he already knows something went wrong.
Answering won't help you."
Maya looked at Patricia.
Something passed between them — two women who had both lived inside Harry's version of events and had arrived at very different points on the other side.
Maya put the phone face-down on the table.
It kept ringing.
Muffled now.
Insistent.
Daniel, who had been standing quietly near the door for the past twenty minutes, stepped forward.
"I think," he said carefully, "that we should move this conversation somewhere more private.
We have guests who came for a wedding."
He was right.
I had almost forgotten.
The caterers were visible through the side door, waiting.
The string quartet had been sitting with their instruments in their laps for forty-five minutes.
The flower arrangements on the tables were beginning to look expectant.
Adele looked at Daniel.
Something moved between them — the particular communication of two people who have already decided to build a life together.
"Give us ten minutes," she said.
He nodded and turned to the guests.
"If everyone would like to move through to the reception hall," he said, with the easy warmth of a man who had clearly spent his life making people feel comfortable, "we'll get started shortly."
The guests began to move.
Slowly, reluctantly, with many backward glances.
But they moved.
In two minutes the ceremony room held only six people: me, Adele, Renee, Maya, Patricia, and my youngest daughter, Clara, who was seventeen and had positioned herself near the door with her arms folded and her eyes fixed on Maya with an expression that reminded me painfully of her face at age two, watching a dog she wasn't sure she trusted.
Maya's phone had stopped ringing.
Then it buzzed once.
A message.
Maya looked at it.
Her face went gray.
"What does it say?" Adele said.
Maya turned the phone around.
The message read: *I know what you showed her.
You have until tonight to fix this.
You know what happens if you don't.*
Clara unfolded her arms.
"Fix what?" she said.
"What is he threatening?"
May you like
Maya looked at my youngest daughter — seventeen years old, born nine months before she left, the baby she had been holding in the photographs — and for the first time since she'd walked into this venue, Maya's composure didn't slip.
It shattered.
