CHAPTER 1

Sophie’s POV

My head was pounding again as I walked up to Derek. That same terrible throbbing behind my eyes that had been getting worse for weeks.

"Derek, could you please come with me to the hospital today?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "The migraines have been getting really bad and the doctor called. The test results are ready."

He looked up from his phone. Not with worry. Just pure annoyance, like I had interrupted something important by asking him to care about me.

He sighed. "I can't. Rosa's flight lands today. I have to pick her up."

My stomach dropped.

Rosa. She was finally coming back to New York.

She had left on our wedding day. I had not forgotten that. I doubted anyone in this house had.

I still remembered standing at the altar in that heavy white dress, my hands cold inside Derek's stiff grip, watching his jaw tighten when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He looked at it for just a second. But I saw his face change. Something behind his eyes went out. He finished the ceremony in silence and I understood without anyone telling me that Rosa was already gone.

She had loved him too much to watch. Two years. She had been gone two full years and Derek had never stopped mourning her. Not once had he looked at me the way I had seen him look at old photographs of her that he thought I didn't know about.

Derek's mother Shirley was sitting across the room pretending to read her magazine. She lowered it slowly and looked at me the way you look at something stuck to the bottom of your shoe.

"Don't bother Derek with such foolishness," she said. "The rightful Mrs. Callahan is coming home today. That is what matters."

The rightful Mrs. Callahan.

I had heard her say it so many times. It always found the same soft spot and pressed hard.

I turned back to Derek. "That's okay," I said quietly. "Could the driver take me then? Just there and back."

Before Derek could answer Shirley put her magazine down.

"Take the bus like normal people," she said with a short laugh. "Who do you think you are? If you hadn't married my son you would still be riding dirty buses and living like the nobody you really are. You are nothing but a gold digger who got lucky."

I didn't respond. There was never any point.

I looked at Derek instead. That same stupid habit. That same quiet hope I could never quite kill.

He was looking at the window.

He never defended me. Not once in two years. I used to tell myself that one day he would decide that whatever he felt about our marriage, I was still his wife and I deserved basic kindness. It never happened. On bad days he didn't stay silent at all. He said things I carried around for weeks, turning them over and over. His words hurt differently than his mother's because I had made the terrible mistake of falling in love with him. I didn't know when it happened. Somewhere in his rare moments of accidental kindness, in the quiet evenings when it was just the two of us and he forgot briefly to be cold. I wished it hadn't happened. It made everything so much harder.

Derek stood and straightened his jacket.

"I'm leaving. Be back before seven. Rosa will want a proper welcome dinner."

He walked past me. No hug. No goodbye. The front door clicked shut.

Shirley picked her magazine back up.

I stood alone in the middle of that big cold house and took out my phone to find the bus schedule. My head was throbbing so badly the screen kept blurring. I pressed my fingers to my temple and waited for it to pass.

I picked up my bag and walked to the door.

Seven o'clock. Welcome dinner. Rosa's first meal back in the home she had always believed was hers.

I had learned the rules of this house. To be useful and quiet and to want very little out loud.

I just hadn't learned how to stop loving a man whose heart had never belonged to me.

The bus was crowded and loud and my head screamed the whole ride. I pressed my forehead against the cold window and closed my eyes. Every bump sent a sharp pain behind my eyes that made me feel sick. I counted the stops so I wouldn't miss mine.

A little girl across the aisle was staring at me. She had two lopsided pigtails and a juice box and she watched me with the kind of open concern that only small children have. The kind that hasn't yet learned to look away.

I tried to smile at her.

Nobody had offered to come with me today. I hadn't expected them to. But sitting on that bus alone with my head splitting, I let myself feel it for just a moment. How completely alone I was in a house full of people.

I got off at my stop and walked slowly to the hospital with one hand pressed to the side of my head.

The waiting room smelled like antiseptic and weak coffee. I sat in a plastic chair with my bag on my lap and my hands folded on top, the way my mother taught me to sit when I was scared. Keep your hands still. Keep your face calm. Nobody needs to see your fear.

I had been doing that my whole life.

Dr. Thomas's secretary called my name after forty minutes.