Learning Curves - By Elyse Mady Page 0,72
how I spend my life outside of this university or who…I love. Life is too short for dishonesty. If my achievements can be so easily overshadowed, I’m not interested in defending them.”
She stood, her voice carrying clearly over the chaos in the room. “Therefore, I respectfully withdraw my candidacy in this competition. I no longer wish to be considered for the Walters Prize.”
Picking up her satchel with deliberate care, she walked across the lecture hall. She stepped carefully, keeping her head high and her shoulders back, gliding across the tiled floor. She ignored everything—the tumult, the shouts, Dean Kessler’s angry tirade, her mother’s tears—and walked through the door, into the bustling hall beyond.
As she was swept away by the crowded flow of students, the irony was unmistakable. It had taken more than twenty-five years but she had finally mastered the elusive pageant walk.
Chapter Fourteen
Leanne Galloway no longer doubted the existence of hell.
As she sat in the country club’s ballroom and toyed with her melting dessert, she willed the polished parquet floor to open up and swallow her. Or for a single well-placed thunderbolt to crash through the expansive skylight and put her out of her misery. Anything really to distract her from the unrelenting reality of her situation.
And the unrelenting ache in her chest whenever she chanced to think of Brandon and everything they’d lost four days ago.
She didn’t think of him as often now. Just every few minutes or whenever an ill-timed reminder happened to interrupt her thoughts and bring him to mind again. So, for anyone who was counting, no more than a few thousand times a day. Maximum.
Like when she looked to her left and saw an empty chair where he should have been and wasn’t.
The bride and groom were still ensconced at the head table, kissing whenever the guests clinked their glassware, as they had been for much of the past three hours. The church had been adorned in bowers of costly orchids and other lush tropical blooms. The bride’s dress dripped with Swarovski crystals, her silk train trailing behind her as she made her steady progress up the petal-strewn aisle, her bridesmaids a wonder of tanned, blond symmetry. The mother of the bride had wept. The father of the bride had sniffed his tears away manfully. The sumptuous feast, held in the country club’s largest ballroom, had been a miracle of culinary arts, each course richer and more decadent than the last.
In other words, a picture-perfect wedding.
Except that the bride was a manipulative bitch who considered her groom a clueless patsy whose real charms were his money and his gold-plated family tree.
Leanne hadn’t wanted to come tonight.
She’d pleaded illness.
Exhaustion.
Heck, if she’d thought it would have worked, she’d have claimed a case of fast-acting Ebola virus.
But her mother had been implacable.
“You’ve already embarrassed us enough, Leanne Cynthia Galloway,” she’d said. “You owe it to your father and me to make an appearance at this wedding. Gillian is our goddaughter and no matter how unfair it is to her, having you there to distract from her big day, I won’t have it be said we’re not standing by our daughter.”
Standing by her?
Yes, if only to make sure the final dagger thrust was accurately delivered.
So here she was, making morose trails through her melting ice cream and pretending she didn’t see the countless smirks, sneers and double takes the wedding’s seven hundred guests cast her way.
Now as the waitstaff began to wend their way around the room, clearing away the dishware from this, the final course, she heaved a sigh of relief that the end of her torture was in sight. A few more minutes, a few boring dances and she could make her escape. She licked the back of her spoon, relishing the last chocolaty drop, and made a mental note to stop by the twenty-four-hour market to restock her freezer’s diminished ice-cream supply as soon as she was free of the three-ring circus.
Her heart clenched with longing at the sight of a couple at a nearby table sharing a tender kiss. She busied herself by spooning the last of her rich dessert into her mouth to avoid the risk of having a whimper of pain escape. She was in enough trouble as it was without giving rise to rumors of a complete emotional breakdown too. Although it would dovetail nicely with the complete professional meltdown she’d experienced this week, which—if the gentle reports from Cassandra were to be believed—was still making furious and salacious rounds through