The screen brightened, and the security footage began to play. Time-stamped, that very morning, the corridor outside the auditorium. There was Brooke, in her royal-blue dress, leaning close to the teenage usher. There was no sound, but there did not need to be. The next clip had sound. Nathan had thought of everything. Brooke’s own voice filled six hundred sets of speakers: “When the woman in the gray coat comes for seat six, tell her it’s taken. If she makes a scene, I’ll record it. That’s the whole point.” A gasp moved through the auditorium like a wave. Steven’s head snapped up toward the screen, then toward his wife.

Brooke shot to her feet. “This is doctored,” she said, too loudly. “He edited it, he’s a jealous child—” But the screen had already changed. Now it showed her text messages, projected large enough for the back row to read. Messages to a friend, sent forty minutes before the ceremony. Going to film his mother losing it and post it tonight. She’ll finally look like the unstable one and I’ll look like the bigger person. The auditorium was no longer whispering. It was silent in the particular way a room goes silent when everyone has understood something at once.