“Sit down,” I demand. “We’re not done here. Not even close.”

“Is there a problem over here?” The woman with the stopwatch approaches the two of us. “The flow seems to be getting clogged up over here, and it’s very important all our patrons get to experience the entire speed dating panel. That is what they paid for.”

“Screw the speed dating panel,” I say, loud enough for Casey at the other end of the table to dart her eye contact away from her turn with young Denzel and over toward me instead. She furrows her brow like a mom telling her child to knock it off from across the room. I lower my voice. “Gemma, come with me, please.”

As I escort Gemma away from the speed dating area, there is a look of panic that washes over the moderator’s face. I know that look well. It’s the look related to what happens when your data gets screwed up. When the outcome you expected and worked toward has suddenly been thrown to the dogs. And for that, I deeply apologize to her because I understand that gut-wrenching feeling. I make a mental note to grab her business card before I deboard the ship and send her an email with notes on how to adjust her metrics in the event she’s expected to do a report-out of this dumb event.

We find a quiet nook adjacent to one of the mobile bars and I attempt to interrogate her without scaring her off.

“You brought my dead husband into this. Now’s your turn to prove that you aren’t just blowing smoke up my ass. So I’m going to ask you one more time: Who’s lying to me and about what?”

She says nothing, just stares at me blankly.

I shake my head and look to the sky. This bitch opens a can of worms but won’t pour them out? What’s her deal?

“Okay, then. Let’s try this. What can you tell me? Besides the fact that you apparently slept with my husband and got pregnant with his child?”

“No, no, no. That’s not at all what happened. This was long before you were ever in the picture, I swear. My son is twelve years old. This...this happened in college.”

“What exactly happened?” I probe.

“It was an accident. A stupid one-night stand and I got pregnant. We both agreed that we weren’t ready to be parents and we weren’t going to be together, so the plan was a closed adoption. He said his mother would never let that happen, especially if she knew it was a boy. Her only son having a son? Yeah, no way was she going to let the Austin name slip away that easily.”

For what it’s worth, that does sound like Debbie. But I’m still not buying this bombshell.

“So I told him not to say anything to anyone and I would just handle the adoption on my own. This was my fault. I was his TA, and even though I was only two years older, I should have known better. I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s life over some drunken night,” she goes on to explain. “I thought I could go through with the whole adoption thing, but as my pregnancy ticked on, I just couldn’t do it. I’d gotten used to the idea of being a mother. I couldn’t imagine just handing over this sweet thing, this piece of me, to a perfect stranger and agreeing to stay out of its life forever. What if I never got pregnant again? So I backed out last minute and didn’t tell anyone. In my head, I rationalized that it wouldn’t change anything. I was just trading one secret for a different one. I still wasn’t going to be with Decker, so he’d never know. But then things ended up getting kind of out of hand.”