Chaos. A woman in the second row pointed at Karen and yelled something furious.

Karen sobbed into her hands, trying to shrink into her seat.

Megan was already out of her chair, speed-walking up the aisle, abandoning her parents to escape the humiliation.

Thomas stood frozen, his face a mask of rage and terror, his political career and his carefully built life disintegrating in real time, live on the local news.

I held up the check and stepped out from behind the podium, walking to the very edge of the stage, looking down at the man who’d thrown me away.

I didn’t use the microphone. In the roar of the room, I looked him in the eye, took the quarter-million-dollar check, and slowly, deliberately, ripped it in half.