Chapter 2

Lucas's brow creased the moment he saw me. "Iris, what the hell are you doing?"

I took out the card I'd brought and set it gently beside the baby's pile of gifts.

"We were classmates for years. You've got a kid now. Shouldn't I bring something?"

A second later, an email landed in my inbox. A confidentiality agreement.

The gist was simple. If Celeste ever found out what Lucas and I had been, the privately funded specialist team treating my mother would walk.

What made my skin crawl was that my mother's name had already been filled in.

Her liver cancer had come back and spread fast, and her local oncology team had run out of standard options.

Lucas was the one who'd introduced me to Dr. Everett Reese, a specialist he knew from grad school whose group took on the impossible cases.

Under that team, my mother had finally stabilized for a while.

I'd never imagined he'd turn her treatment into a leash.

Celeste gave Lucas a playful glare.

"Why are you being so harsh? She's only trying to be nice."

She opened a velvet box with a four-leaf-clover bracelet inside, the kind that comes from one of the big houses.

"You're one of Lucas's old classmates. I'd feel bad taking a gift like that from you without giving something back."

Hannah spoke up beside her. "Just take it. Celeste has plenty of pieces like that."

Celeste smiled. "Exactly. Don't be shy about it. My husband buys me things like this constantly.

"Sometimes he'll buy a whole matching set at once. It's honestly ridiculous."

Something twisted in my chest.

The entire time we were together, Lucas acted like he was barely scraping by.

Once, out shopping, I'd stopped in front of a bag and he offered to buy it for me.

I told him no and said I'd look for a used one online, because we were saving for a house.

He'd just finished complaining that his manager had held back one of his commissions.

I looked around at our mutual friends. One by one, they found reasons to leave.

They hadn't just hidden his marriage from me. They'd watched him play poor and said nothing.

I could picture exactly how ridiculous all those years of grinding must have looked to them the second I left the room.

I took the bracelet and walked out of that hospital in a fog.

It wasn't until I got back to my hotel that it finally broke and I cried.

When Lucas and I first got together, our friends used to joke that we were two broke kids clinging to each other.

I worked through college and still carried a big share of my mother's medical bills.

Lucas seemed even worse off, stretching every dollar until it snapped.

We both believed that if we worked hard enough together, it would get easier eventually.

Back then we couldn't afford more than a twelve-dollar pizza from the place on the corner, and we'd sit there talking until they started flipping the chairs onto the tables.

After graduation he insisted on going back to Harborwick to start a company, and I took an offer in Rosebridge. We told each other we'd build it from both ends.

At the airport he held me so tight I couldn't breathe and promised that once we had a home, we'd get married.

I waited six years.

For six years I ran like a machine.

Day job, freelance at night, weekend classes whenever I could get them.

At my worst I slept about four hours a night for three straight months and nearly landed myself in the ER.

And I thought I was happy. It never crossed my mind that the whole thing I was bleeding for wasn't real.