Part of Your World(10)

Yes, my friends were there. Jessica, and Bri, and Gabby. But that didn’t outweigh having to work with Neil for the rest of my life—and it would be the rest of my life. There was no one else.

Right now Neil was playing the remorseful ex. But it wouldn’t last. Once he saw he wasn’t going to get me back, he’d switch strategies, and it would get mean.

He always got mean.

I put my face back in my hands. “Why am I the last in the dwindling Montgomery breeding program? It’s like some cruel joke.”

Mom and Dad had me and Derek for the sole purpose of continuing the family line. Bred, molded, groomed, and told from my earliest age that I was destined to work at Royaume Northwestern and I was not to take my husband’s name if I ever got married. But it wasn’t supposed to be me in the limelight. It was supposed to be Derek.

I felt a hand on my arm. “Don’t let them decide the life you’re going to live. You only get one.”

The words hung there between us. But I was too weak to pick them up.

Derek knew the truth. I had no choice in the matter now.

I’d never, ever get away.





Chapter 6

Alexis



Six days later I sat with Bri at the nurses’ station in the emergency department at Royaume Northwestern. I hadn’t seen her over the last week—mostly because we didn’t have any shared shifts, and I was too busy with my brother to talk on the phone or do the drinks we’d planned. Derek left on Saturday, back to his new wife, after telling our parents that he was leaving for good.

Dad, as expected, completely lost it.

He didn’t say it, mostly because I don’t think he had time to gather his thoughts in the chaos of Derek’s NDA and marriage announcement, but I could sense the disappointment descending on me, like he was realizing that I was all that was left of the great Montgomery/Royaume legacy, and all was to be lost.

Derek had always been the golden child, so it hadn’t mattered that I was always mildly disappointing in terms of my accomplishments. I didn’t want to publish papers in medical journals or do speaking engagements, like he did. I hated the spotlight. I just wanted to help people.

But now as the only Montgomery on staff, anything other than complete and total professional domination would be considered an embarrassment to my prestigious lineage—and I was already off to a bad start. I wasn’t a surgeon, I wasn’t pioneering any medical advancements, my face would not appear on magazine covers. It was like Dad just found out the most useless princess had ascended the throne.

Bri clicked away at her computer next to me. She was charting her patients. Her brown hair was tied up into a loose bun, and she had her stethoscope draped around her neck. She looked like the results of a Pinterest search for “beautiful physician.”

Briana Ortiz was an ER doctor like me. We’d met in med school. She was thirty-four, Salvadorean, and very good at her job.

“So,” Bri said, “are you going to tell me what happened? The rumor mill’s chugging out a story that Derek quit?” She did a final tap and turned to me.

I looked at her over my reading glasses. “It’s not a rumor.”

“They’re also saying he was wearing a wedding ring.” She gave me a raised eyebrow.

“That I cannot discuss,” I said, doing my own final tap on my keyboard. “I signed an NDA.”

“Your own brother made you sign an NDA,” she deadpanned.

“He did. It’s been a whole week of firsts.”

A nurse came out of room four. “Nunchuck Guy’s here. Again.”

I groaned.

“Send him to CT,” we called in unison. Bri looked back at me. “So what’d you do all week?”

I sighed. “Hung out with Derek and my parents. We went to that new restaurant in Wayzata on Friday, and Mom decided it was the time and place to give me her Team Neil speech about going with him to couple’s counseling. Said he deserves a second chance. I feel like he’s asking people to talk to me. This is the second attempted intervention this week.”

“The man boned an anesthesiologist. Who you have to work with. What doesn’t your family get?”

I rubbed my temple tiredly. It wasn’t just Neil’s cheating. Bri and Derek were the only ones who knew the real reason why I wasn’t giving him another chance. Bri wouldn’t pee on Neil if he was on fire after what he’d put me through the last couple of years.

But everyone else? Everyone loved Neil. My parents, our friends. He was the life of the party, everyone’s buddy.

“I mean, they all started off sympathetic enough,” I mumbled. “How could he? I hope you threw him out on his ass. Blah blah blah. But then Jessica’s birthday came up and everyone went to the lake house, and Neil and I weren’t there, and I think it finally started to hit everyone that life as we all knew it for the last seven years is over. Then it suddenly flipped to, Well, have you considered counseling? It was just that one woman, he made a mistake and he knows it. I think he’s sleeping on a futon at Cam’s,” I added wearily.

Bri made a disgusted noise. “The man’s a surgeon. He’s gotta sleep on his twenty-two-year-old’s sofa? He can’t get a damn apartment?”

“I think the second he does, this whole thing suddenly becomes real.”