“I’m taking the side of what actually happened.”
That sentence changed the room.
Until then, Colin had treated the problem like an awkward interruption that could be managed.
Now he realized the interruption was standing beside him in an ivory dress wearing his ring.
He looked at me.
“You knew this would happen.”
“I knew Amelia might recognize my name.
I didn’t know what she had seen.”
“Convenient.”
I closed the folder.
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Deciding I’m guilty before you know what happened.”
His mouth opened.
Then closed.
Amelia removed her engagement ring.
My mother made a tiny sound.
Colin went completely still.
Amelia did not hand the ring back.
She simply held it between two fingers while she looked at him.
“I need you to answer something.”
“What?”
“If Sophie had walked in tonight and I hadn’t recognized her, would you have let your family keep humiliating her?”
He glanced toward me.
“That’s not what happened.”
“It is exactly what happened.”
“We joke with each other.”
“She wasn’t laughing.”
He had no answer.
Neither did my parents.
Amelia slid the ring into her small clutch.
“I’m not ending anything tonight,” she said before Colin could speak.
“But I am not pretending this dinner is normal.
And I need to talk to my father before I make another decision about this wedding.”
My mother’s face collapsed.
The evening she had designed as proof that Colin had entered a superior family had suddenly become a room full of unanswered questions about both families.
Amelia stepped away from the table and called her father.
She moved near the window, speaking too quietly for us to hear most of it.
But we saw her expression.
First controlled.
Then tense.
Then angry.
At one point she said clearly, “No, I need you to answer me.
Was Sophie Merritt the person who reported those altered files?”
Silence followed.
Amelia looked at me across the room.
Her face gave me the answer before she ended the call.
When she returned, she did not sit beside Colin.
She sat across from me.
“He admitted he knew your name,” she said.
Colin’s shoulders sagged.
“What else?”
“He said the consulting firm told him you were a difficult employee who was creating problems around the engagement.”
I nodded.
That language was familiar.
Difficult.
