9
I left.
I want to be precise about this, because people are going to tell this story in a hundred different ways for a long time, and most of them are going to get the why wrong. I did not run. I did not flee in tears. I set my wine glass down on the nearest surface, I smoothed the front of my dress with one hand, and I walked through that crowd toward the exit with my spine straight and my face arranged, because a woman who leaves a room broken gives every person in it a story to tell about her weakness, and a woman who leaves a room with her composure intact gives them nothing but a story about her strength, and I was not going to hand Atlanta society the former when the latter was available to me at the exact same cost.
People parted for me without understanding why they were parting.
I made it to the lobby doors.
The shot happened four feet from me, in the lobby, close enough that I went down to my knees on the marble before my mind caught up to my body. I want to tell you I held the same composure I had managed inside that ballroom. I did not. I screamed, once, before any part of my training could stop it.
A man was bleeding on that floor and Kordel was already down beside him, and from where I knelt I understood that it was his brother. I got up by myself, because I did not want help. My father found me in the chaos, took one look at my face, asked me nothing, and walked me to his car.
***
In the car, finally, alone with my father and the privacy of leather seats and a closed door, I let myself feel exactly four things, in order, the way I have trained myself to process anything overwhelming since I was a girl watching my own mother's life come apart in public.
I felt humiliated. Three hundred people had just watched the man I was supposed to marry hold another woman's son in his arms while I stood by helpless to do anything but watch.
I felt afraid. Because somewhere behind us in that hotel a man had been shot, and I did not yet know if my future, whatever was left of it, was tangled up in whatever had caused that.
I felt, God help me, relieved. Because some door I had been holding shut with both hands for two weeks had finally been kicked down by somebody else, and I no longer had to be the one who decided when and how to detonate my own life.
And underneath all three of those, quiet and absolute and entirely mine, I felt something that surprised me more than the gunshot had.
I felt free.
I put my hand on my stomach, where a child that was not Kordel's fault and not mine either was already deciding, on its own schedule, to become a person.
"Take me home," I told my father. Then I corrected myself, because home had stopped being an address I shared with anyone the moment that boy's voice rang out across that ballroom. "Take me to your house, Daddy. I need somewhere to think."
He drove. He did not say one word the entire way, which was its own kind of love, and somewhere around the second highway exit I stopped fighting it and let myself cry, finally, in the dark, where no camera in the world could catch what it cost me.