Chapter 1: The Toast

The rain soaked through my coat before I let myself admit I wasn’t leaving.

I should have been. Any sane woman would’ve turned around at the corner, gotten back in the car, driven home to a bathtub and a glass of wine and pretended this night didn’t exist. Instead I stood across the street from the Aldermere Grand, arms wrapped around myself, watching light spill out of those tall glass windows like nothing bad had ever happened to anyone who walked through them.

Nobody told my feet to stop here. They just did.

Water ran cold down the back of my collar. Somewhere behind me a car door slammed, heels clicked fast across wet pavement, a woman laughed at something her date said. Life went on, all around me, like the world hadn’t just cracked open in one very specific spot — right here, right where I was standing, looking in.

Through the glass, I found him.

Marcus.

Head tipped back, laughing at something. A champagne glass in his hand, halfway to a toast. Ivy stood pressed against his side in a dress the color of a bruise that hadn’t finished healing yet — deep purple, black at the edges where the light didn’t reach.

The whole room lifted their glasses at once.

I couldn’t hear the words. I didn't need to. I read it in the way people’s eyes kept dropping to Ivy’s left hand, the way the room tilted toward her like she was the sun now and everyone had already rearranged their orbits.

An engagement. Or close enough that it didn’t matter which.

My hand went to my collarbone before I could stop it.

Old habit. There used to be a ring that lived right there, on a chain, tucked under my scrubs during hospital rounds because gold and latex gloves don’t mix. My fingers found only skin. I made myself drop my hand back to my side.

The champagne caught the light exactly the way it had the night Marcus proposed to me.

Same gold. Same tilt of the glass right before he spoke. Same stupid little laugh he always gave when he was about to say something he’d rehearsed and didn’t want anyone to know he’d rehearsed it.

That was the detail that got me. Not the dress. Not her hand on his arm. The champagne, catching light like it had no idea it was supposed to mean something different this time around.

“Miss? Are you alright over there?”

I turned. A man stood a few feet off under a black umbrella, face creased with the specific worry strangers give you when they can tell you’re not fine but don’t actually want to know why.

“I’m fine,” I said.

The words came out thin. Cracked right down the middle.

He didn’t believe me. I watched him decide not to believe me, and then watched him keep walking anyway, because a crying woman in the rain outside a party isn’t anybody’s business at eleven at night.

I turned back to the window.

Marcus’s mouth kept moving. I kept smiling. I used to be fluent in that smile — knew which version meant nervous, which meant proud, which meant back me up on this later, Elena, I’ll explain after. I didn’t know this one. It belonged to a man I used to be married to and apparently didn’t know anymore.

I told myself, in the car on the way here, that I was past this. Past standing outside things that used to belong to me, watching someone else hold them like they’d grown there naturally.

I was lying to myself. I’d been lying to myself since I put the car in drive.

Because here I was — soaked through, mascara probably halfway down my face, watching my ex-husband toast to whatever came next for him, and every piece of me I thought I’d stitched back together split open again. Quiet. Clean. Like a seam giving way on the inside of a coat where nobody can see it happen.

My phone buzzed against my hip.

I almost didn’t check it. My hands had gone numb ten minutes ago and there wasn’t a single thing on that screen that could matter more than what I was watching through this glass.

Then I looked anyway.

Unknown number.

One message, sitting there glowing in the dark.

I know you’re outside. Turn around.

Everything in me went still. The rain. My breath. My heart, for one long second, just stopped moving altogether.

Someone was watching me.

Right now. Close enough to know exactly where I stood, exactly what I was doing, exactly how far I’d fallen from the woman who used to belong in that ballroom.

My fingers tightened around the phone.

I turned.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​