The Reading of the Will
The Guest in Green

The Live Feed

August 25, 2026 · Part 7 of 10 · 2 min

Roz ran, heels forgotten somewhere between the hallway and the ballroom, lace hem torn at the hem from the speed of it.

Delphine had sunk into a chair near the head table, one hand braced white-knuckled against the tablecloth, the other pressed flat against her belly. Her face had gone pale under a sheen of sweat.

"It's early," Delphine said through her teeth, half to herself. "It's too early, it's not supposed to — it's just stress, it has to just be stress —"

"Has anyone called an ambulance?" Roz's voice cut across the ballroom, loud and sharp enough that it silenced the last of the whispering.

No one answered. Two hundred guests, half of them still holding raised phones — livestreaming, Roz would learn later, to no fewer than four separate accounts, the footage already spreading past Windmere Manor's walls into a world that hadn't been invited but was watching anyway — stood frozen, waiting for someone else to act first.

"Someone call an ambulance," Roz said again, and when nobody moved fast enough, she grabbed a guest's phone directly out of his hand and dialed herself, giving the address in a voice she didn't recognize as her own — clear, commanding, nothing like the girl who'd been catching bouquets three hours ago.

Weston appeared at the ballroom's edge, breathless from the hallway. "Is she okay? What's happening?"

"Get back," Delphine gasped at him, one hand raised. "Don't — don't touch me, don't come near me right now, just — "

"I'm trying to help —"

"You've helped enough," Roz snapped, kneeling beside Delphine's chair despite everything, despite the dress, despite the wreckage of the last twenty minutes, because underneath all of it there was a woman in pain and a baby who hadn't chosen any of this. "Breathe. The ambulance is coming. Just breathe."

Weston tried to step closer again, and this time it was Gerald Hartley who put a flat hand against his chest and pushed him back, not gently.

"You don't get to be the hero in this room," Gerald said. "Not tonight. Not ever again."

Somewhere near the bar, a guest's phone camera caught all of it in one unbroken shot — the bride on her knees beside her fiancé's mistress, the groom shoved backward by his own father-in-law, the whole gilded ballroom holding its breath — and within the hour, the clip would have a name attached to it online that none of them had chosen: #TheGuestInGreen.

Continue the story Part 8: The Ambulance →

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