Part of Your World(9)

“I am.” He pulled out his phone and handed it to me.

I stared at the picture of the two of them together in what appeared to be a wedding photo.

Lola Simone was a huge, Lady Gaga–level rock star. Only she didn’t look the way she did in the tabloids in these pictures. She looked normal. Shoulder-length brown hair, a modest white dress with a flower lei. Derek was in white linen, beaming.

“She’s incredible, Ali. The most remarkable woman I’ve ever met.”

I raised my eyes to him. “And you married her. Without me there?”

His smile fell the slightest bit. “No one was there but her agent, Ernie. We had to keep it small,” he said, taking his phone back. “Her privacy is super important to her. She gets recognized everywhere she goes. She has no anonymity. The paparazzi hound her constantly. It was just easier to do it there and do it quietly.”

“Well, when am I going to meet her? You didn’t bring her?”

“She’s too busy with her project to leave. And she doesn’t like coming back here.”

“Well, she’s going to have to come back eventually. You live here, and your volunteer work ends in a few weeks.”

His smile fell again. “Ali, I’m not coming back.”

I blinked at him. “What? What do you mean you’re not coming back?”

“I’m moving to Cambodia to be with my wife.”

The news punched me right in the gut. “Moving to Cambodia…” I said, disbelief in my voice.

“To get her women’s home up and running. To do more volunteer work. They need surgeons and there’s a lot of good we can do there.”

I sat back into the sofa. Then the true impact of what he’d said hit me. I raised my eyes to him. “No. You can’t leave me here with him.”

He managed to look even sorrier than he already did. “You’ll be okay.”

I shook my head. “No. No, I most definitely will not be okay. You can’t do this to me, Derek. I can’t keep working with Neil. I can’t. I tried it. I’m already applying to other hospitals. I can’t see him every day.”

He dragged a hand down his mouth. He didn’t answer me. He studied someplace behind me. He couldn’t look me in the eye.

I was a Montgomery.

A Montgomery had worked at Royaume Northwestern Hospital since the day it was built in 1897. I came from a family of legendary doctors who made huge strides in medical advancements over the decades. They were powerful philanthropists who made possible the bulk of the programs and clinical trials that Royaume was famous for. It was my family’s legacy. We were the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies of the medical world. Last year the History Channel made a documentary about it as part of their Titans of Industry series. Half the hospital was named after us. There was a Montgomery Memorial Garden. A Montgomery Pediatric Wing. There had never been a single day in almost a hundred and twenty-five years that Royaume didn’t have a Montgomery on staff. It was more than a tradition, it was an institution.

Mom and Dad had been there, but they retired in March. Derek was there and so was I. But with Derek leaving…

It was going to have to be me. I was going to have to stay.

I couldn’t be the Montgomery who undid it. I couldn’t dismantle the franchise. It would literally go down in the history books.

It was like I’d just been handed a life sentence. And he knew it.

“Look,” he said. “Maybe it’s time to break the chain. The hospital isn’t going burn down if a Montgomery isn’t on staff—”

“Great. Good idea. How about I leave first and then you quit.” I cocked my head, and he pressed his lips into a line. “That’s what I thought.”

He averted his eyes. “Any chance Neil will move?”

“He’s the chief of surgery. He’s been at Royaume for twenty years. I think we have a better chance of him getting struck by lightning than him going anywhere else.”

He looked back at me and sat quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry. I know the position this puts you in.”

I looked at him, hopelessness washing over me.

“You don’t know what it’s like, Derek—the way Neil chips away at me. He’ll start to gaslight me, make me feel like I deserved what he did, and I’ll get so confused and broken down and tired that I’ll let him back in out of sheer exhaustion. I have to leave, Derek. I don’t have any other way to protect myself.”

He paused for a long moment. “I have to live my life, Ali. And that’s with Nikki, doing what I know I’m meant to do.”

I put my face in my hands.

We went quiet for a long time.

“How did I not feel it?” I whispered. “How did I not know that you were falling in love and deciding something so big? I should have sensed it. It should have felt like a glitch in the matrix.”

“How did I not know Neil was hurting you until you told me?”

I sniffed and took my face from my hands, but I couldn’t look at him.

“He spent so many years taking pieces of me,” I said quietly. “I’m trying to put myself back together, and now I have to do it without you? And with him always there?”

He inched closer to the edge of the sofa. “You are strong enough for this. And all your friends are at Royaume. Don’t let him run you off. You deserve to be there if that’s where you want to be.”