I tiptoed into my own house without turning on the lights like a teenager sneaking in after curfew.
It was six-thirty in the morning, I had one shoe on, my hair was a tangled mess, I was caked in mud and farm animal fur, and I was wearing a hoodie I’d stolen on the way out.
I’d panicked.
I’d panicked, and I ran while he was asleep.
I woke up in a strange man’s bed in a dusty garage in a town in the middle of nowhere after having what was admittedly the best sex of my entire life—with a twenty-eight-year-old.
He was twenty-eight.
I’d gotten up to use the bathroom and put on his hoodie. When I was washing my hands, his wallet fell out of the pocket, open to his driver’s license.
I knew he was younger than me. I just didn’t realize he was almost a decade younger than me.
I’d had a one-night stand with a total stranger, who was a decade
younger than me.
What was I doing? I didn’t do things like this. I didn’t have casual sex. I didn’t do risky behavior. I’d made Neil wait two months before I’d slept with him, and when I finally did it was during a very well-planned romantic trip to Mexico. I’d spent a week picking out the lingerie I was going to
wear, and I got waxed and exfoliated, and there were petals on the bed. I’d never had sex with anyone who wasn’t my boyfriend in my entire life. And now I’d just made an exception with a guy I’d just met who was almost as young as Neil’s son.
I completely freaked out.
I’d gotten dressed and fled in the night, stepping in dog poop on the way out. Or maybe it was pig poop? Or goat poop? Whatever it was, there was so much of it that it sucked my shoe right off my foot and I left it like a lizard shedding its tail to make its escape.
I hobbled into my dark living room, tossing my keys on the credenza. “Where were you?”
I gasped at the phantom male voice coming from the direction of Neil’s favorite armchair. And then a light flicked on and my heart started beating again.
“Derek! Oh my God, you scared me half to death.”
My twin brother beamed at me from the recliner. “Hey, sis.” Then he looked me over and sat up, worried. “Are you okay?”
I scoffed and looked down at my destroyed dress and bare foot. “Yeah.” I blew out a breath. “I’m fine. How’d you get in here?”
“Your alarm code is the same one you use for your phone.”
“You know the code to my phone?” I reached back and took off my lone heel.
“I know all your codes. Even when you change them.”
I laughed dryly. My brother and I had a touch of twin telepathy going on.
Always had.
“What are you doing back?” I asked, padding across the room in my bare feet and flopping on the sofa. “I thought you were in Cambodia for another six weeks.”
“Came back early.”
“But not early enough to save me from half a week in Cedar Rapids alone with our parents,” I deadpanned.
“Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me there.”
I laughed again, leaning my head back on the sofa and closing my eyes. “Is that a hickey?”
My head shot up. “WHAT!?” I bolted off the couch and ran to the mirror over the credenza, looking at my neck.
“Damn,” I breathed, seeing the quarter-size purple blotch by my ear. “That’s a little tenth-grade retro, don’t you think, sis? And I’m slightly
pissed at you for not telling me you got back with Neil.”
I groaned, touching the splotch with my finger. “I didn’t.”
Derek eyed me. “Then who gave you that…” He seemed to notice my hoodie at the same time. “And since when do you wear camo?”
“I don’t,” I said, groaning at the mark. I was going to have to put a Band- Aid over it, it was so big. I pulled the hoodie open and rolled my eyes. There was a hickey on my breast too. I looked again. Both of them.
Derek waited in silence for me to elaborate.
“I met someone. It’s over,” I said, abandoning my examination, dropping back down on the sofa, and scrubbing my hands over my face.
“You met someone? When?”
I lolled my head to look at him. “About ten hours ago?”
He blinked at me. “Okay. You’re having a midlife crisis. I’ve seen this before. We can get you help.”
I laughed. God, I probably was having a midlife crisis. How else could I explain this?
“My car got stuck on the way home from the funeral and this guy towed me out. He was nice and very cute, and I went home with him to eat a
grilled cheese—which was really good, actually. He made it from stuff in his greenhouse. Then there was this loose pig running around and it got mud all over me—”
“A pig?” He looked amused.
“Yeah. It came running out of the woods. Scared the crap out of me. It was like three hundred pounds. I guess it got loose from a nearby farm or something? It was friendly. I petted it. Then a dog jumped on me too. The guy had a baby goat in pajamas and—”
He put up a hand. “Say no more, that explains everything.” I laughed tiredly.
“Anyway, it’s not going to be a thing,” I mumbled. “I didn’t even get his last name.”
“Did you use protection?”
“Yes. Of course. I still have my IUD and he used a condom.” A few of them, actually…I blushed thinking about it.
“Good. Well, I’m glad you’re having fun—and that it wasn’t Neil.” I scoffed. “Yeah, same.”
“I see his stuff is still here.” He nodded to the garage.
I rubbed my forehead. “I packed it all up, but he refuses to come get it.”
Derek leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when it happened,” he said seriously.
“It’s fine. You were saving the world,” I said wearily.
Derek had been gone for six months doing volunteer work with Doctors Without Borders. He was a plastic surgeon. A good one. He was out there treating burn victims and children with cleft lips. I could hardly be upset that he wasn’t here to tell Neil to go to hell in person—though as I understand it, he definitely did via satellite phone.
I looked over at him. “Why are you back? They let you out early?”
A slow smile crept across his face. “I can tell you, but you have to sign an NDA.”
I laughed, thinking it was a joke, but he reached into a messenger bag resting on the side of the chair and pulled out a piece of paper and a pen.
I blinked at him. “You’re kidding me.”
“Look, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t to keep a promise.” He slid it across my coffee table at me.
I eyed him. “You want me to sign an NDA before you, my brother and closest confidant, can tell me why you’re in my living room.”
He pushed the paper toward me another inch and tapped an index finger on the signature line.
I shook my head and picked it up, scanning it. “What is this?”
He put up a hand to quiet me. “Just sign, and then I can tell you everything.”
I sighed. “Okay,” I mumbled, scrawling my name on the dotted line. I set it back on the table and tossed the pen on top. “You have your paperwork. Tell me.”
“I got married.”
I bolted straight up. “WHAT?!”
He was beaming. “Last weekend. I’ve been seeing her for six months.” I gawked at him. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“I couldn’t. I promised. It was important to her.” “But…but you tell me everything,” I said, incredulous.
He nodded. “I know. Which should tell you how important her trust is to me.”
I sat deeper into the sofa, my eyes moving back and forth across my lap. “Married…” I breathed. I looked up at him. “To who?”
“Her name is Nikki. She’s a recording artist. A famous one. She was in Cambodia setting up a women’s home for survivors of sex trafficking.”
I scanned my limited knowledge of current recording artists. “Nikki… Nikki who?”
“Her stage name is Lola Simone.” “No,” I said.
He was grinning.
“You are not married to Lola Simone.”
“I am.” He pulled out his phone and handed it to me.
I stared at the picture of the two of them together in what appeared to be a wedding photo.
Lola Simone was a huge, Lady Gaga–level rock star. Only she didn’t look the way she did in the tabloids in these pictures. She looked normal. Shoulder-length brown hair, a modest white dress with a flower lei. Derek was in white linen, beaming.
“She’s incredible, Ali. The most remarkable woman I’ve ever met.” I raised my eyes to him. “And you married her. Without me there?”
His smile fell the slightest bit. “No one was there but her agent, Ernie. We had to keep it small,” he said, taking his phone back. “Her privacy is super important to her. She gets recognized everywhere she goes. She has no anonymity. The paparazzi hound her constantly. It was just easier to do it there and do it quietly.”
“Well, when am I going to meet her? You didn’t bring her?”
“She’s too busy with her project to leave. And she doesn’t like coming back here.”
“Well, she’s going to have to come back eventually. You live here, and your volunteer work ends in a few weeks.”
His smile fell again. “Ali, I’m not coming back.”
I blinked at him. “What? What do you mean you’re not coming back?” “I’m moving to Cambodia to be with my wife.”
The news punched me right in the gut. “Moving to Cambodia…” I said, disbelief in my voice.
“To get her women’s home up and running. To do more volunteer work.
They need surgeons and there’s a lot of good we can do there.”
I sat back into the sofa. Then the true impact of what he’d said hit me. I raised my eyes to him. “No. You can’t leave me here with him.”
He managed to look even sorrier than he already did. “You’ll be okay.”
I shook my head. “No. No, I most definitely will not be okay. You can’t do this to me, Derek. I can’t keep working with Neil. I can’t. I tried it. I’m already applying to other hospitals. I can’t see him every day.”
He dragged a hand down his mouth. He didn’t answer me. He studied someplace behind me. He couldn’t look me in the eye.
I was a Montgomery.
A Montgomery had worked at Royaume Northwestern Hospital since the day it was built in 1897. I came from a family of legendary doctors who made huge strides in medical advancements over the decades. They were powerful philanthropists who made possible the bulk of the programs and clinical trials that Royaume was famous for. It was my family’s legacy. We were the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies of the medical world. Last year the History Channel made a documentary about it as part of their Titans of Industry series. Half the hospital was named after us. There was a Montgomery Memorial Garden. A Montgomery Pediatric Wing. There had never been a single day in almost a hundred and twenty-five years that Royaume didn’t have a Montgomery on staff. It was more than a tradition, it was an institution.
Mom and Dad had been there, but they retired in March. Derek was there and so was I. But with Derek leaving…
It was going to have to be me. I was going to have to stay.
I couldn’t be the Montgomery who undid it. I couldn’t dismantle the franchise. It would literally go down in the history books.
It was like I’d just been handed a life sentence. And he knew it.
“Look,” he said. “Maybe it’s time to break the chain. The hospital isn’t going burn down if a Montgomery isn’t on staff—”
“Great. Good idea. How about I leave first and then you quit.” I cocked my head, and he pressed his lips into a line. “That’s what I thought.”
He averted his eyes. “Any chance Neil will move?”
“He’s the chief of surgery. He’s been at Royaume for twenty years. I think we have a better chance of him getting struck by lightning than him going anywhere else.”
He looked back at me and sat quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry. I know the position this puts you in.”
I looked at him, hopelessness washing over me.
“You don’t know what it’s like, Derek—the way Neil chips away at me. He’ll start to gaslight me, make me feel like I deserved what he did, and I’ll get so confused and broken down and tired that I’ll let him back in out of sheer exhaustion. I have to leave, Derek. I don’t have any other way to protect myself.”
He paused for a long moment. “I have to live my life, Ali. And that’s with Nikki, doing what I know I’m meant to do.”
I put my face in my hands. We went quiet for a long time.
“How did I not feel it?” I whispered. “How did I not know that you were falling in love and deciding something so big? I should have sensed it. It
should have felt like a glitch in the matrix.”
“How did I not know Neil was hurting you until you told me?”
I sniffed and took my face from my hands, but I couldn’t look at him.
“He spent so many years taking pieces of me,” I said quietly. “I’m trying to put myself back together, and now I have to do it without you? And with him always there?”
He inched closer to the edge of the sofa. “You are strong enough for this. And all your friends are at Royaume. Don’t let him run you off. You deserve to be there if that’s where you want to be.”
Yes, my friends were there. Jessica, and Bri, and Gabby. But that didn’t outweigh having to work with Neil for the rest of my life—and it would be the rest of my life. There was no one else.
Right now Neil was playing the remorseful ex. But it wouldn’t last. Once he saw he wasn’t going to get me back, he’d switch strategies, and it would get mean.
He always got mean.
I put my face back in my hands. “Why am I the last in the dwindling Montgomery breeding program? It’s like some cruel joke.”
Mom and Dad had me and Derek for the sole purpose of continuing the family line. Bred, molded, groomed, and told from my earliest age that I was destined to work at Royaume Northwestern and I was not to take my husband’s name if I ever got married. But it wasn’t supposed to be me in the limelight. It was supposed to be Derek.
I felt a hand on my arm. “Don’t let them decide the life you’re going to live. You only get one.”
The words hung there between us. But I was too weak to pick them up. Derek knew the truth. I had no choice in the matter now.
I’d never, ever get away.
