SARAH
I stepped down from the podium, the microphone's faint buzz still hanging in the air behind me like the last note of a song no one wanted to hear.
The room had gone strange, not silent, but muffled, like someone had wrapped the whole ballroom in cotton. Faces turned toward me, then away. Whispers rippled outward in waves I could feel but not quite hear. Eyes slid past mine, refusing to land.
I didn't care.
They could look away or whisper. None of them mattered.
I moved through the crowd with my head high, my hand resting protectively over my stomach, a gesture I'd practiced in the mirror until it looked natural. Maternal. Vulnerable.
People parted for me like I was contagious.
Maybe I was.
I'd just detonated a bomb in the middle of their perfect evening, and now they didn't know whether to pity me or fear me. So they did both, from a distance.
My heart was pounding, but not from nerves. From anticipation.
