Stephanie’s composure had been deteriorating progressively since the screen lit up, and by the time the messages were visible it was gone entirely.
“Turn it off,” she said. “Turn it off right now.”
“Then explain it,” Nick said.
She could not.
The door opened.
The man from her phone — the contact with the heart beside the initial — walked in. He had apparently been informed of the party in some way, though not in the way Stephanie would have preferred. He stopped when he saw the crowd, and the screen, and the specific quality of the silence in the room.
Nick looked at him.
“That’s the person she’s actually been with.”
The man left almost immediately. The kind of exit that requires no announcement, that says everything through its speed.
Stephanie moved toward Nick. “Please. Stop.”
“I can’t explain something that isn’t true,” Nick said. “And you can’t either.”
He walked to the table. He cut the cake.
Inside was not pink or blue. Inside was a photograph. Stephanie and the man from the messages, framed in the way you frame something you want to present, with a caption that made clear what the relationship had been and how long it had been ongoing.
The room did not respond with the delighted sounds of a gender reveal. It responded with the particular stunned quiet of a group of people who came in expecting one kind of afternoon and are standing in the middle of a completely different one.
Nick returned to the microphone.
“I’m ending the engagement,” he said.
Stephanie’s voice had broken entirely.
“Nick—”
“You can keep the ring,” he said. “It sounds like you’ll need it.”
No one laughed. No one moved. The room was absolutely still.
He set the microphone down.
He walked toward the exit.
