I looked at him.
“I didn’t touch her.”
“She’s delicate,” he said, pulling Brittany up against his chest. “You can’t come at her like—”
“Look at me,” I said, “and tell me you believe I pushed her.”
He hesitated.
One second.
Then Brittany put her face in his shirt and sobbed, and he stopped looking at me.
Gloria said, “Camille, apologize to the girl.”
“For what?”
“For whatever you did. She’s on the floor.”
“She put herself there.”
“Apologize,” Derek said, “or leave your own kitchen. Your choice.”
The eggs were on my floor.
The ring was on her hand.
And in my robe pocket upstairs was a card with a bird on it from a woman who thought I was dead.
“I’ll get a mop,” I said, and went to the pantry, and while I was in there, out of sight, I took out my phone and did the one thing Judy Miller’s card had made possible.
I called my lawyer.
“Monique. It’s Camille. I have an engagement invitation to my own husband’s wedding. Postmarked Dayton. The bride’s mother thinks I’m dead. And I’ve got a kitchen full of witnesses who just watched his mother put a family ring on the girl. I’d like to know what I do with all that.”
Monique Baptiste, who’d done my prenup in 2018 and had told me then “you’ll never need this and I’ll charge you anyway,” was quiet for a moment.
“Camille,” she said. “Bring me the envelope. And don’t say a word in that kitchen. Whatever they’ve told his mother, they’ve told that girl’s mother something worse. We’re going to find out what.”
PART 2
Here’s what Derek told Judy Miller.
I know because I drove to Dayton on a Thursday, eight hours, and sat at her kitchen table in a house with new granite counters he’d paid for.
Judy was sixty, a retired school secretary, with reading glasses on a chain and hands that couldn’t stay still.
She’d opened the door and looked at me for a long time and said, “You’re alive,” and I’d said, “I’m alive,” and she’d said, “Then come in, because I’ve been sick about this for three weeks.”
“He told us you’d passed,” she said. “Two years ago. He said it was cancer. He cried at this table. He said he couldn’t talk about it. Brittany held his hand. Howard—my husband—Howard went to the garage and came back with the good bourbon. We thought we were comforting a widower.”
“He renovated your kitchen.”
“He said it was what you’d have wanted. ‘Camille loved a kitchen.’ He said your name. He said it like—” She stopped. “He said it like a man says the name of a woman he’s buried.”
“And the engagement.”
“August. On the porch. He gave her a ring from a store in Chicago and said the family ring would come at the wedding. That’s what he called it. The family ring. He said his grandmother’s.”
“That’s the one his mother put on her finger yesterday. In my kitchen. With me standing there.”
Judy took off her glasses.
“Brittany was in your kitchen.”
“Making eggs.”
“With you alive in the house.”
“With me alive on the stairs.”
Judy looked at the granite.
“I want you to understand something,” she said. “I raised her better than this. I don’t know when she found out you were alive. I don’t know if he told her before he told us you were dead or after. But she knew by August, because she asked me in August what I’d think of a man who ‘had to end something properly before he could start something new,’ and I said that sounded like a divorce, and she said ‘sort of,’ and I let it go. I let it go, Mrs. Holloway. That’s on me.”
“Why did you send the invitation?”
“Because in September she said your name.”
“My name.”
“She said, ‘Camille’s being difficult about the timing.’ And I said, ‘Who’s Camille,’ because the only Camille I knew was dead, and she went white and said ‘his sister,’ and he doesn’t have a sister named Camille, I’ve met the sister, her name’s Erica. I went upstairs and I looked in her old yearbook for a Camille and then I did what any mother does. I looked you up. You’ve got a business. Wedding planning. Reed Events. Your face is on the website. You’re not dead. You’re in Atlanta doing somebody’s centerpieces.”
Reed Events.
Mine, since 2015.
Paused, mostly, for three years, because Derek had said “you don’t need to work while I’m building this,” and I’d let it idle down to two weddings a year and a website I hadn’t updated.
“So I mailed it,” Judy said. “The invitation. I addressed it myself. I didn’t tell Howard. I didn’t tell her. I thought, if she’s alive, she deserves to know there’s a party. If she’s not, it comes back. It didn’t come back.”
