All Chapters of I Remember the Wedding That Killed Me: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The list has four things on it by the time I've finished the coffee.One. Move money somewhere Celeste can't touch and my father can't "manage" for me. Two. Buy the Route 9 warehouse district before anyone else understands why it matters. Three. Find out exactly when the first case gets reported, because I know it happens but I don't know the date down to the day, and a day is going to matter more than anyone alive right now understands. Four. Stay close enough to Julian and Celeste that I see it coming before it happens again, instead of finding out through a pane of glass.I get dressed. I go downstairs. I walk into my father's study without knocking, which I never do, and he looks up from his desk like I've grown a second head."I want to talk about the trust," I say."Good morning to you too." He sets down his pen. Richard Sterling has the kind of face that's spent thirty years deciding what other people are allowed to see on it, and right now what he's allowing is mild, indulgent

I don't sleep.I lie in bed running Celeste's voice over and over in my head — Route 9 data, before the audit, if Marcus finds out — until the words stop sounding like English and start sounding like a lock I don't have the shape of the key for yet. By four in the morning I've decided I'm done waiting for the shape to come to me.I drive to Route 9 myself.It's stupid. I know it's stupid while I'm doing it, the same way you know a lot of things are stupid in the exact moment you're doing them anyway. But I remember what these four warehouses become in four months — the last open corridor east of the river, the difference between a city that eats and a city that doesn't — and I can't make myself wait for daylight to find out what Celeste needed pulled from a file before anyone with real authority looked at it.The district's exactly as empty as I remember it being for a decade. Chain-link fencing gone soft with rust, sodium lights buzzing over cracked asphalt, not another car in sight.

Damian pulls me sideways so hard my shoulder scrapes the shipping container, and then we're running, low and fast, along the fence line toward the back of the lot where the chain-link gives way to a gap somebody cut years ago and never bothered to fix."Through here." He goes first, holding the wire up so it doesn't catch my dress — jeans, I remind myself, not the wedding dress, that was a different night, a night that hasn't happened yet — and I duck through after him, gravel biting my palms when I catch myself on the other side.Behind us, the dog starts barking in earnest, close, closing."Car," Damian says, already moving, and I follow him half a block down a side street I didn't even notice was there until we're both in the front seat of a black sedan I never saw him park, and he's pulling out onto Route 9 with his headlights off until we clear the block.Neither of us says anything for almost a mile."You want to tell me," he says finally, headlights back on now, voice steadier

Damian drops me two blocks from the hospital because I ask him to, because whatever's happening in there, I don't want to walk in flanked by a billionaire nobody's supposed to know I'm associated with yet. I regret it within about ninety seconds of getting out of the car.The emergency bay is a wall of noise before I even reach the doors — gurneys, raised voices, a security guard standing in the doorway with his arms crossed telling a line of people that the hospital isn't taking new admissions right now, which is the kind of sentence hospitals don't say unless something has already gone very wrong inside.I find Reyna's number and call instead of texting. She picks up on the second ring, breathless."Ivy, I can't talk, we've got a situation—""I'm outside. Let me in.""You can't, they've got the bay locked—""Reyna." I say her name the way I used to say it when we were nineteen and she was about to talk herself out of something she actually wanted to do. "Let me in."There's a pause,

By noon, Ashford Biotech has a statement out.I watch it on the kitchen television with my mother, who has the sound turned up over the caterer's sample menu spread across the counter, and there's Julian's father on screen, gray-suited and calm, using words like isolated and fully contained and no risk to the broader public with the specific practiced smoothness of a man who has said sentences like this before and expects to say them again."Terrible," my mother says, not looking up from the menu. "Can you imagine, some kind of contamination at Mercy General. Good thing the Ashfords caught it so quickly."I don't say anything. I watch Marcus Ashford's face on the screen, perfectly composed, and I think about a man's hand tearing a restraint rail like paper, and I think about six new patients in twenty minutes, and I understand that whatever "contained" means to the people writing that statement, it does not mean what my mother thinks it means.My phone buzzes under the counter, out of