The Wedding Game That Cost Him Everything Chapter 26
There was no small talk.
“I need you to confirm this is the original link Tucker sent you.”
“It is.”
“The video hasn’t been edited?”
“What I saw was exactly that. By the time the three-party committee found them, what happened in the footage had already taken place.”
There was silence on the other end for a moment.
Sierra’s breathing was very light.
“I’ve waited a lot of years to hear that sentence.”
I thought of her in a wedding dress, sitting on the dais and pulling off her prosthetic leg to beat Sloane with it.
At the time, it had looked as if she wanted to repay all the pain of those years in one burst.
But after the beating, her leg still wouldn’t come back.
I asked, “What else do you need from me?”
“A formal statement. And if the three-party committee reopens the inquiry, you may have to testify.”
“That’s fine.”
Chloe gently nudged me.
She wasn’t trying to stop me. She was only worried.
I had been gone from the United States for a long time.
Stepping back into all of this meant describing every image from that wedding all over again.
Tucker’s face when my wrist dislocated. The sound of my parents’ ashes falling into water. All those hands reaching for me.
They had never vanished.
I had only learned not to let them run my life.
“Isolde,” Sierra said my name. “You can refuse. I know this isn’t fair to you.”
I lowered my eyes to the nails Peace had just painted for me.
A patch of red, a patch of blue, color smeared all over the skin around the edges.
“I’m not refusing,” I said.
“The leg Sloane owes you shouldn’t be buried again under another ‘it was just a joke.’”