Chapter1

Three days before my wedding, I found a spreadsheet on my fiancé's laptop.

It was a Google Sheet called "Operation Prank Nora."

Five years of my life, broken down into rows.

Row one: "Fake terminal diagnosis." After that came "Swap out her fellowship," "Talk her out of the promotion," and "Get her to sign the condo over to Maddie."

Every row ended in a neat green checkmark.

While I sat there staring, the cursor blinked, and a new row typed itself out in real time.

"Fake wedding."

In the corner of the screen, his Messages app lit up. A group chat. Four people.

I wasn't one of them.

My best friend, Maddie, had started a poll: "When does Nora figure out she's not actually dying?"

Tyler, Ethan's oldest friend, answered first. "She won't. If she could figure anything out, she wouldn't have handed Maddie her entire life."

My stepbrother, Logan, kept it short. "She's an idiot."

Then Ethan. "Even if she finds out the wedding's fake, she won't make a scene. She thinks she's dying. She'll probably just hand me off to her best friend."

A row of crying-laughing reactions stacked up under his message.

For years, they'd joked about "the bit" they had going. Inside jokes I never got. Laughter that stopped when I walked into the room.

Now I understood. I was the bit.

I was still sitting there, numb, when Maddie FaceTimed me.

"Nor! Okay, don't kill me. I tried on your ring, just for fun, and now it won't come off." She wiggled her hand at the camera, my engagement ring flashing on her finger. "If it messes up the wedding, you're not mad, right?"

Ethan leaned into the frame, beer in hand. "Don't be mad at her, babe. And I'm just being real here, but with your condition, a ring on your hand is kind of a waste."

Behind them, I could see the whole party. It was supposed to be our Jack-and-Jill, a party for the bride and groom. Our friends were there. My stepbrother was there.

There wasn't a single empty chair.

Nobody had saved one for the Jill.

I shook my head. "I'm not mad."

Why would I be? I wasn't going to be at that wedding anyway.

---

The second the call ended, the group chat exploded.

Maddie: Did you guys SEE her face??

Maddie: She has no idea the ring was sized for me from the start. It was never hers.

Ethan sent a GIF of someone patting a puppy on the head.

Ethan: Smartest girl I know. Go check it off.

Tyler: Wait, with the fake wedding, that makes ten, right? We said when we hit ten we'd do a trip.

Logan didn't bother replying. He just dropped four flight confirmations into the chat. Chicago to Cabo.

I counted the names twice.

None of them were mine.

My hands shook as I closed the laptop.

The wall above Ethan's desk was covered in framed photos. Ethan and the guys in Tahoe. Ethan and Maddie on a boat in Miami. All four of them in matching hats at some music festival in Austin.

I wasn't in a single one.

They always went without me, and they always had a reason.

"You need to rest, Nor," Maddie would say, squeezing my hand. "Your body can't handle it."

Ethan was blunter. "The whole point of a trip is to have fun. If you come, you're a ticking time bomb. Everybody's just going to be watching you the whole time, waiting for something to happen. It kills the vibe."

So Maddie saw the Northern Lights in Iceland for me.

Maddie swam with the dolphins in Hawaii for me.

And Santorini, the trip Ethan and I had been planning since we were teenagers, I found out about at the gate.

The scanner beeped. A red light. The agent frowned at her screen and told me my reservation had been canceled.

Ethan smacked his forehead. "Oh, crap. I canceled your seat and booked Maddie. I totally forgot to tell you."

"It's her birthday wish. She's only got one birthday a year, right? You and I can go whenever."

But I didn't think I had a "whenever."

I went home and cried for three days over a travel itinerary I'd stayed up all night color-coding.

It was only tonight, scrolling through that chat, that I found out what happened next. The Nest cam in our living room had caught all of it. They'd clipped the footage and posted it to the group.

My crying was their content.

They'd laughed at how weak I was. How stupid. How easy.

And then they'd gone back to the spreadsheet and added another checkmark.

I didn't cry this time.

I opened the laptop again, pulled up the spreadsheet, and took a screenshot of every single row.

Then I opened the group chat and started scrolling up. Five years of messages. It took me all night.

I sent every screenshot to a brand-new email account that only I knew existed.

The sky was already turning gray when Ethan finally got home.

He stopped in the doorway and raised an eyebrow. "Did you wait up for me?"

"Yeah," I said quietly.

"Aw. Somebody's clingy." He dragged the words out, grinning, and reached over to twist a strand of my hair around his finger.

When he leaned in, I smelled it under the beer. A perfume I knew.

Maddie's.

It was a soft floral scent, the kind you barely notice on her.

On Ethan, it was strong.

I pulled back before he could touch me.

His hand closed on empty air, and he froze.

"You're mad I didn't invite you tonight?"

So he did know. He knew exactly how messed up it was to throw a Jack-and-Jill without the Jill.

"Nor, come on. It's not that I didn't want you there. It was loud, there were a ton of people, I didn't want you to get overwhelmed."

He sighed like I was being unreasonable, then went to the kitchen cabinet and came back with my pill bottle. He set it in front of me, all gentle and attentive.

"You forgot your meds again, didn't you?"

I looked down at the orange bottle in front of me.

Five years, and I had never once asked what was really inside it.