9. Delilah
DELILAH
I come tumbling out of the pantry like somebody shoved me.
I promptly run right into Connor’s chest.
He steadies me with a hand on the elbow and frowns down. “Dee, there you are! In… the pantry? What the heck were you doing in there?”
“I needed, uh…” I cast around for something to explain why I was crouching among the cereal and spare toilet paper. All at once, the sense memory of the green-eyed stranger’s whiskey-tinged breath floods me. “Some liquid courage,” I finish. “I’m a little nervous about doing the slideshow.”
“Oh.” He wrinkles his nose. “It’s not a big deal at all. Just some dumb pictures. Who cares?”
“Right,” I say, face heating. “Yeah, right. You’re right, of course.”
“Then let’s get it over with,” he says, firmly dragging me along with him.
Vivian meets us at the entrance to the living room. “Thank God!” she cries. “Are we doing this or not? I’ve been standing around waiting for a freaking century. Some of us have plans after, you know.”
“Sorry,” I mumble. “I got… It doesn’t matter. Yeah, let’s get started.”
I look past her to see my mom. Like the others, she rolls her eyes. “It’s about time. Weren’t you the one who wanted to do this sooner rather than later? You’ve got us all waiting on you now, Delilah, dear.”
I start to apologize again, then realize all of a sudden that I never want to say the word “sorry” to these people ever again. Instead, I say, “Put the kids in the den, Mom. All of them, and shut the door.”
She does a double-take at my tone. “Pardon me?”
“You heard me.”
Her mouth falls open. She’s not even mad; she’s just so confused at hearing this voice come out of me that she’s completely unprepared for how to respond. “I— Well, I— They’ll want to see the pictures.”
“I’m sure they’d prefer the television.” I glance past her. “Uncle Bub, can you take them?”
With a shrug, Uncle Bub lumbers out of his seat, calls to the horde of kids, and they all go tailing off after him into the den. My mother is left flabbergasted, but she doesn’t say anything else.
“Everyone!” I call out. “Find a seat! The slideshow is about to begin.”
My laptop is where I left it on the side table, cabled into my father’s projector. I crack open the lid and turn everything on. Then I grab the remote clicker, stride to the front of the room, and take my place next to the projector screen.
I turn and look out at the crowd. Fifty sets of eyes look back at me.
Here goes nothing.
“Alright,” I say. The hubbub in the room dies down. “As you can clearly see, I’m not my dad. He’s the one who did this every year. He’s gone now, but I’m still going to do it the way he did—at first. Then I’ve added my own special little surprise at the end.”
With that, I start the deck.
The screen goes white, then goes to the title card.
DORSEY FAMILY CHRISTMAS EVE
And under that, in the smaller font:
Dad’s slideshow. Year 26.
The room goes aww all at once. I click again and his version of Silent Night starts to play through the speakers.
I almost feel guilty, because the first half is so sweet and charming. A squalling, red-faced Vivian and a cherub-cheeked two-year-old me, lying on either side of my mom in her hospital bed with my dad looming next to us, grinning from ear to ear.
All four of us at Nathan’s on the boardwalk. I had mustard smeared on my nose.
Vivian’s sweet sixteen. She’s wearing a tiara.
Dad’s sixtieth. He’s asleep in a chair with a paper crown crooked on his head, and I’m behind him, out of focus, a cake in my hands.
The rest of the family is threaded throughout.
Uncle Johnny manning the grill at a Memorial Day barbecue, Aunt Virginia and Uncle Dave dancing at a wedding, Cousin Maryanne’s Halloween party, a family reunion at the lake, my grandmother at ninety, sitting straight up in a folding chair with her purse in her lap, because she never once put it down at a party in her life.
I click. I click. I click again.
The oohs and awws and laughs continue. Not one person in here is unhappy right now. They are all having a lovely fucking time.
And then the deck gets to my sister.
It’s the high life captured one frame at a time. She glows and puffs up bigger and bigger with every single one.
Cannes, Tulum, Rio de Janeiro.
Nightclubs, yachts, helicopters, mansions.
Pretty clothes and flashing jewelry, blown-out hair and glistening nails.
My skinny, perfect, radiant sister always perfectly captured.
“Doesn’t she photograph well?” my mother sighs. “My little girl is such a beauty.”
Everyone is eating it up, but three people are even more enthralled than the rest.
My mother.
My husband.
And Vivian herself.
I stand tall in my shapeless black cardigan and wait. Wait. Wait. Wait just a little bit longer, savoring the last few seconds these people will ever have before the curtain is ripped back and the mask is removed and they come to see her for what she really is…
… and then I click one more time.
The next slide confuses them a bit.
A cropped shot of a notification, with the little iCloud badge and all, blown up big.
Vivian Dorsey has added 3 new videos to the Dorsey Sisters shared album.
1:04 A.M.
“This came in the night before last while I was making four hundred sugar cookies,” I explain. “Viv and I have had a shared album since 2015. Her phone backs up to it. She’s never turned it off. Here’s what she uploaded.”
Click.
The clip I cobbled together runs. It’s brief but devastating.
Four seconds of a dark bedroom.
A headboard, my quilt, the ring I gave my husband.
Two bodies intertwined.
Then the audio.
A moan.
Another.
His.
Hers.
Cut.
Connor speaks. “This is so fucking reckless. We’re gonna get caught.”
Vivian answers. “Relax. She never notices anything.”
My husband’s sigh. My sister’s laugh.
End of footage.
I don’t think there are words that can describe the quality of the crowd’s silence. They think they’ve just seen something horrible.
They don’t know we’re just getting started.
“That’s my bed,” I say. “That’s my headboard, my quilt, my house. On August eighth, I was asleep on the cot in my bakery after a very long night of work. Meanwhile, my sister was fucking my husband in my bed.”
“Dee.” Connor pushes off the sideboard. “Dee, turn it off.”
“I’m not done.”
“Turn it off—”
“Ed,” I say, “would you keep your son where he is, please?”
And Ed, God bless the loudest man in Brooklyn, puts a hand on Connor’s chest to sit him right back down.
I click again. “In case anyone was unsure or thinks I’m lying, I grabbed a helpful little freeze frame and blew it up. As you can see right… here… that’s the heart tattoo on Vivian’s hip, and right next to it is my husband’s hand, gold wedding band included.”
Next.
“When Vivian realized that she’d accidentally uploaded these videos to our shared album, she hurried to delete them. As you can see here and here. Unfortunately for her, it was too late.”
Next.
“This image shows a hotel receipt from the Marriott by the Brooklyn Bridge. They got steak-frites and then a little sweet treat for the two of them. How nice, right? But— Oh, dear. What’s that date say?”
The date runs a foot tall across the top of it. 7 FEB 2026.
“Delilah,” my mother snaps, “what the hell is this?”
“Read the date, Mom.”
From the back of the room, from an aunt who has done the crossword at every family function of my life, comes a horrified gasp.
“Oh—oh, God. Leanne… Leanne, that’s the day we buried him.”
“It is,” I say. “I guess funerals put them in the mood.”
Click.
“But they were in the mood a lot this year,” I continue. “I happened to come across some text messages they’d been exchanging. Look here, and here, and here, and here, and— Well, I could go on, but you get the point. They liked to meet up at that hotel a lot.”
Click.
“They also liked to slip away at just about every family function where they could find fifteen minutes and a broom closet. I bet they did it at some of your houses. Might want to hire a cleaning service.”
Click.
“They said some other stuff, too. Mostly about me. Would anyone like to read them?” I ask.
Not one person budges or makes a peep.
“No? Nobody? Okay, that’s fine. I’ll do it.”
those jeans make her look fkin massive
there’s more of her every year.
Eat-It-All Delilah
“Take your time,” I encourage the stunned crowd. “They did.”
I can hear a fly buzzing around the room, but not one person reacts to it. They’re all frozen in their seats, jaws on the floor. Vivian is the color of milk.
“If that were all they’d done to me, it would be unforgivable,” I say. “But it’s not all. Not even by a little bit.”
Click.
“Apparently, it wasn’t enough to rip apart my family and steal away my husband. No, these two wouldn’t be satisfied that easily. They wanted to take more from me. I found this in my sink.”
The image on the slide shows a corner of paper, burned to a crisp along the top, with V HAVEN HOLDINGS, LLC across what’s left of the letterhead.
“The name typed above that line is mine,” I say. “The signature isn’t.”
Connor drops his beer and whimpers.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking: ‘It’s a burnt-to-shit scrap of paper. It could be anything.’ I tried to tell myself the same thing. But then I found this in the mail today.”
I take four stapled pages out of my bag with my own dried blood smeared across the top corner where the envelope sliced me. I hold them up over my head so the back of the room can see.
“This document spells out the full terms of what Connor did. He took out a loan for four million dollars, secured against my bakery as collateral. He hasn’t repaid a penny of it, and the lender no longer thinks he will. On the 15th of January, they’re going to come and take it.”
I click and the screen goes to the final slide, pure black.
“So there it is,” I conclude. “My husband has been sleeping with my sister for over a year. The night of my father’s funeral, they lied to all of us so they could go do it some more.
And then he signed my name to a four-million-dollar loan and handed over my life’s work as collateral for money I have never seen one penny of. How’s that for holiday cheer?”
Silent Night gets to the end.
Nobody moves.
Every single face in that room is turned toward the screen. Every mouth is agape. My mother has both hands flat on the piano, Vivian is frozen half up off the loveseat, and Connor is gawking in disbelief at a document he thought was on fire.
All of them are shocked… except one.
Off to my right, past the kitchen doorway, the pantry door is open a crack. Two inches. No more.
Through that crack, still cloaked in the darkness, somebody is looking at me.
And smiling.