Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 69

Chapter 69

The morning arrived bright and full of noise.

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My social media had gone exactly as I had planned. The notifications were in the thousands. Every major outlet had picked up the story. My name was trending and Dominic’s name was trending beside it and anyone in the country who had not known who I was yesterday knew who I was today.

I went out and found a dress. Deep blue, fitted, the kind of cut that held everything in place and made everything look intentional. I had my hair done by the woman who always got it right, soft waves pinned back on one side. My makeup was precise and camera-ready, a bold lip, defined eyes, the face of a woman who was exactly where she was supposed to be.

I looked at myself in the mirror before I left.

The hotel ballroom had been set up with rows of chairs facing a low stage. A long table on the stage, microphones, name plaques, a backdrop with the Ford Biosciences logo that I had arranged to be printed and delivered that morning. The room was already filling when I arrived, journalists and photographers and camera operators setting up their equipment, the particular energy of a crowd that had come specifically to look at something.

They looked at me when I walked in.

I heard the whispers follow me to the stage.

“She is beautiful.”

“She looks exactly like you would imagine his wife to look.”

“That dress.”

I sat down at the table and adjusted the microphone and smiled at no one in particular and felt, for the first time since that party, like myself again.

I scanned the room for Dominic.

He would come. I was certain of it.

The first journalist raised her hand.

“Mrs. Ford, how long have you and your husband been married?”

“We dated for almost two years,” I told her, keeping my voice warm and practiced. “We have been marriet for almost a year

now.”

“And how did you meet?”

Dominic.

I started to rise from my chair, my mouth already opening to say his name.

The gunshot split the air before I had fully stood.

Something slammed into me from the side, a body, moving faster than I could process, and the floor came up hard and fast and I hit my side and the glass behind where I had been sitting exploded in a shower of fragments.

The room erupted.

Screaming. Running. The crash of chairs.

I lay on the floor of the stage with someone’s weight pinning me down and my ears ringing and the ceiling of the ballroom spinning above me and I screamed, a long raw sound that came from somewhere underneath the shock, because I had been sitting in a chair answering questions about my husband a second ago and now there was glass everywhere and someone had just tried to kill me.

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