“It was a joke.” Hazel looked at her son then, looked at him the way you look at a stranger wearing the face of someone you love, and said, “A joke?” And Amber, cornered, snapped: “Oh, please.

Nobody was going to die.” “No,” I said.

“You only wanted a woman who raised your husband to tear her dress in front of two hundred people.

Forgive me for failing to laugh.”

Chapter 14 — The Footage

Then Michelle connected her tablet to the large screen the couple had planned to use for their honeymoon slideshow, and the security footage from my study filled it, ten feet tall, for the whole room to see.

Amber, at my desk, photographing my files.