Lauren’s stomach lurched. “He said we had a table in the back.”
“That part is technically true.” Megan’s voice remained even. “The back room has a table. It also has a stage, though he calls it a conversation platform because he doesn’t like the word stage.”
Owen let out a short breath that contained no laughter. “He was going to put my wife in front of an audience.”
“He may have hoped she’d agree once she arrived,” Megan said. “He knows how to make refusing difficult. A room full of people smiling. Someone lifting a camera. A waiter bringing flowers. He makes decisions look inevitable by arranging the furniture first.”
Lauren recalled Reid asking about her childhood ambition to become a costume designer. He had wanted photographs of her early work, images she assumed he was collecting because he cared. He had asked whether she still owned the blue dress she wore when they first met, whether Owen knew their old song, whether she regretted the quiet life she had chosen. Her answers had been intimate and sometimes unkind. She imagined those words repeated under warm lights to strangers who had bought tickets to admire her bravery.
“What else did you bring?” Owen asked.
Megan took out a notebook. She opened it to a page containing six names, each beside a time and a short description. “These are employees who’ve been told tonight is an ordinary paid event. They aren’t responsible for his stories. I don’t want them caught in a scene they don’t understand.”
Lauren looked at the names. A server, a bartender, a photographer, two kitchen assistants, and a young events coordinator. Under the last name Megan had written: Thinks this is a surprise vow renewal. Lauren’s anger finally found an object. The surprise wasn’t merely the audience. Reid had told different people different stories, so each would perform one small part of a fiction he alone could see.
Owen’s phone buzzed. His lawyer had sent a routine reply to a question he asked that afternoon. He silenced it without reading. The three of them sat with the strange realization that their private confrontation had acquired witnesses before any of them knew it existed.
“What do you want from us?” Owen asked Megan.
“First, I want Lauren to understand what she’s walking into. Second, I want the people who’ve paid to be told what the event actually is. Third, I want to talk to my husband without being made into the unreasonable woman ruining his work.”
“You have reasons to ruin his work,” Lauren muttered.
“I have reasons to stop his lies. That’s not the same thing.”
The distinction embarrassed Lauren because she’d arrived in the hallway planning to call Owen’s objection an attempt to control her. Now Megan was standing in her kitchen carefully separating accountability from revenge. Lauren could not remember when she had last made such an effort herself.
