Chapter 3

Lila pressed her face into Hale's chest and sobbed loud enough for the whole room to hear.

I was still blinking the whiskey out of my eyes when Rory's hand clamped around my arm. She dragged me away from the staring guests, up the staircase, and shoved me into the master suite.

This room used to be mine.

When I first came home from overseas, I couldn't sleep. Every siren sounded like incoming fire.

So Hale started bringing me out here on weekends, away from the noise and the trauma bay.

After fourteen-hour shifts, when I forgot to eat, he'd show up with takeout from my favorite Thai place and sit with me until I finished.

He'd ordered a custom orthopedic chair because my neck locked up after long surgeries.

Small, quiet kindnesses. They had convinced me I was loved.

Now the room was a nursery.

My chair was gone. So were my books and the framed map of every place I'd served.

In their place stood a crib, a changing table, and a rocking chair. Stuffed animals lined the windowsill. Tiny onesies with the name Corbin stitched across the front hung in the open closet.

Every trace of me had been cut out, clean as an incision.

"What Hale has with Lila is love," Rory said.

She folded her arms and stood in front of the door. "You were a debt. You took shrapnel for him in Kandahar, and he mixed up feeling grateful with being in love. That's all it ever was."

I stared at her. "What are you talking about?"

She didn't answer. She just looked at me like I was a patient who didn't understand her diagnosis.

Then she picked up a remote from the dresser and pressed a button. A screen slid down over the windows, and a projector hummed to life.

Photos. One after another. Hale and Lila.

Toasting with champagne in a ski lodge in Aspen. Walking barefoot on a beach in Big Sur. Kissing on the deck of a sailboat off Nantucket.

"They've been together three years," Rory said. "Remember your birthday last year? Hale wasn't at a cardiology conference in Chicago. And Jesse and I weren't on our honeymoon."

She walked over and tapped the biggest photo in the middle of the screen.

Hale in a tailored tux. Lila in white silk, barefoot in the sand, the ocean behind them and an arch of white flowers over their heads.

"We were all on Kiawah Island," Rory continued. "Standing up for them. Watching them get married."

I couldn't breathe.

"And the hospital?" she went on.

"That was Hale's idea. He told the guard to make sure you couldn't work for a while. We didn't have a choice. If you'd figured out who Lila was while she was lying in your ER, who knows what you would've done to her."

I looked at my best friend and didn't recognize her. I couldn't understand how those words were coming out of the same mouth that used to tell me everything.

Four months ago, at her wedding to my brother, Rory had walked straight past every bridesmaid and put her bouquet in my hands.

She'd grown up bouncing between foster homes, and she told me that night I was the closest thing to a sister she'd ever had.

She'd even pulled Hale aside in front of everyone and told him that if he ever broke my heart, she'd make him regret.

And now she was the one doing the breaking. She'd helped them tear my life apart, and she was standing here proud of it, explaining to me that I was the one who'd been thrown away.

A tear finally slipped free and ran through the whiskey drying on my cheek. I didn't even have a name for what was ripping through my chest.

Everything I'd given them—my loyalty, my years, the blood I'd lost—they had taken and ground into the dirt. I would have died for any one of them. My heart was in so many pieces I knew it would never be whole again.

The door opened. Hale came in with his arm still wrapped around Lila, who was sniffling against his shoulder.

Jesse trailed behind them and wouldn't look at me.

I looked at the three of them. Then at Lila's wet, pretty face. The woman who had taken my whole family without breaking a sweat.

And just like that, the rage drained out of me. What it left behind was cold and empty.

"If that's how it is," I said. My voice came out calm, almost too calm for the quiet room. "Then he's yours. I'm out."

"Dr. Marrick..." Lila faltered.

"Wren, what are you talking about?" Hale's jaw tightened. His eyes searched my face for the screaming, crying woman he'd expected to find.

I didn't answer. I slid the engagement ring off my finger. It told every board member, every donor, every surgeon's wife exactly who I belonged to.

I stepped forward, took Lila's wrist, and pressed the ring into her palm.

"I hope you three have a long, happy life together," I said, and I didn't put an ounce of warmth into it. "The perfect little family. Built on lies, and stuck with every one of them."

Jesse and Rory stood frozen, staring at me.

Hale went rigid. His mouth opened, and for the first time, I saw real panic cross his face. He reached for me, like he wanted to say something, like it had only just hit him that I was actually leaving.

But I didn't want to hear another word from him. Not ever again.

I walked past him and out the door, and I didn't look back.