Die for Me

Chapter One

One

The Grand Ballroom of the Edison Mansion is a study in gold: gold velvet curtains, gold pillars, gold candelabras from which amber-colored flames flicker and flare.

Brandon Pendersen, my colleague and fellow Broadview Hospital lifer, fits right in with a gold satin tie that matches his new wife Leila’s golden beach waves.

I still remember his first wedding, fifteen years ago, under a sagging drop ceiling in the basement of Chicago’s city hall—Brandon in an ill-fitting navy suit, Winona, his ex-wife and my best friend, in a vintage tea-length dress she’d thrifted from Goodwill two weeks earlier.

They’d had nothing between them but five hundred thousand dollars in student loans, thirty cumulative hours of sleep that week, and a promise to love each other forevermore…

which Brandon broke two years ago when he fell in lust-love with the twenty-something-year-old device rep with whom he is currently swaying to Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect.”

Under the table, I text Winona.

Winny. You sure it’s okay for me to be here? It feels wrong.

Winny’s response is immediate.

Of course I’m sure. I asked you to go. And besides, Sophie needs an ally out there.

My eyes flicker to Sophie, Winny’s twelve-year-old daughter, who is sitting at the head table in a burgundy cap-sleeved dress and examining her black fingernails with the determination of a preteen who can be forced to sit still but not to put on a show.

Well, if it’s any comfort, Brandon’s hairline looks like someone drew it on with a marker.

I can almost hear Winny’s laughter in my ears, more wheeze than sound, like she’s choking on a marble.

Oh my god the plugs! You should have seen what they looked like when they were growing in. Like a Christmas tree farm on New Year’s Eve. Was hoping they would all fall out for his big day.

Trust me girl, that would’ve been a blessing. He looks a mess right now.

Like an old man in denial, Winny responds.

I snort, then take a sip of Bordeaux to cover for it.

Brandon invited the entire interventional cardiology subsection to his wedding, but I was still shocked to receive an invitation.

On a professional level, he and I were still cool.

We covered each other in the cath lab when one of us was running late, traded calls when necessary, jumped in on each other’s cases when we needed a first scrub with more experienced hands than our trainees could provide.

On a personal level—well, he’d courted and eventually cheated on my best friend right under my nose at our shared place of work.

Maybe our many years of calling ourselves a throuple had given him the impression that he could split my allegiance like he had his daughter’s custody, but I was Winny’s before I was his, and I would be Winny’s forevermore.

When Brandon betrayed Winona, he’d betrayed me too, spat on the sacred union that was husband, wife, and perpetual third wheel.

For all his faults, Brandon should have been smart enough to know that.

And yet he’d still invited me to his wedding.

“I know you hate me right now,” Brandon had said as he’d handed me the wax-sealed gold envelope. “But I still consider you my friend, Sean. I really do want you there.”

Later that night, I’d asked Winny if she wanted me to burn it.

“I want you to go,” she’d said instead. “If only to bear witness.”

To the end of their marriage, as I had once its beginning.

The ballroom erupts with applause. I place my drink, and my phone, down on the table, plastering what I hope is a polite smile on my face as Brandon dips Leila into a passionate kiss on the dance floor.

“Gorgeous,” Joseph Krause, one of the four other interventional cardiologists at my table, says.

He’s twenty-five years older than the rest of us and clearly losing his edge in the lab.

Despite this, he still sees himself as a steward of the kind of wisdom that requires imparting whenever he senses he’s losing the spotlight.

Like now. “Second weddings are always much more romantic than firsts, don’t you agree?

You’ve learned more about yourself. Know what true love actually looks like. ”

My colleagues, most of whom have had lavish second weddings themselves, laugh.

I exchange a queasy look with Haoran, the only man at our table still with his original wife, a lovely woman named Katherine who cuts furiously at her chicken breast and pretends not to care that the rest of the table seems to think she has an expiration date.

Her arms are sloped, doughy, and the fine lines on her forehead have never seen Botox or filler, and she’d once confessed to me at a work dinner that she too felt like it was only a “matter of time.”

I don’t agree. Haoran is dutiful and kindhearted, a family man through and through. He also, however, isn’t the confrontational type, which means that while Krause expounds on his idea of true love only being found on the second go-round, he says a whole lot of nothing.

Which means I have to be the bad guy.

“I don’t really understand the need to get married again, in that case,” I say, tilting my head to the side. “If you don’t know yourself well enough to reliably keep a vow, why make another one?”

Once upon a time, seeing Krause shoot daggers at me from across a table might have made me nearly wet myself. Nowadays, it’s like watching a baby throw down his rattle.

“You’ve never been married before, right, Sean?” Krause says, tossing an arm around the back of his (second) wife’s chair. She beams up at him, either unaware or unfazed by the fact that she is being used as a prop. “I’m not sure you would understand.”

“I’m not particularly interested in tying myself legally to someone, no,” I say primly.

“Yes, I’m sure there’s a line of suitors just banging down your door,” he sneers.

I hold back a snort. Krause doesn’t know that I was once engaged—albeit to a horrible man—or that my phone log is full of texts from guys who made it to date three and are begging for a chance at number four.

Men like him can’t comprehend that they might be the worst thing to happen to a woman.

They can only conceive of themselves as a gift, even though most of us consider Krause a very powerful nuisance on his best day.

“I see you’ve been by my place,” I snip. “You can take a ticket, if you’d like.”

Krause’s scowl thins his lips so much that they disappear behind his Colonel Sanders–esque white mustache.

“Marriage gives you stability. A home to go back to,” he says. “Eventually you’ll get old and gray, and all those suitors you turned your nose up at will head out for greener pastures. You should settle down before you run out of options.”

The laugh that escapes my chest is hoarse with righteous indignation.

“Is that why you cheated on your ex-wife?” I ask. “Because she was getting a little too old and gray for your tastes?”

Krause’s wife gasps, someone chokes on their drink, and Katherine gives me an appreciative look. Meanwhile, Krause’s hold on his fork tightens like he’s thinking about lodging it in my neck.

“Oooookay. Daggers away,” Haoran, ever the peacekeeper, says. “I propose a toast—to an open bar on Brandon’s tab!”

We raise our glasses, Krause begrudgingly. Then, before our tentative peace can be disrupted, the emcee clinks a glass; it’s time for speeches.

For the rest of the program, I keep my attention on the happy couple, who look up at each other with sugary smiles as friends and family exalt them and their relationship.

The mood is light and airy, as if the happy couple formed their bond at a run club rather than through clandestine meetings in the cath lab supply closet.

The Pendersens are many in number, but I note that Leila’s side is eclectic, strikingly young, and only takes up one table.

I’d pieced together her backstory through brief conversations we’ve had since she started working at Broadview: parents who died young, an older brother who followed only a few years later.

What family she has now she had to forge on her own—something that I felt had connected us.

Before she became my best friend’s ex-husband’s love interest. Still, for a wedding celebrating such an unseemly union, it’s surprisingly mundane.

By the time the third speech ends, I’m fighting back yawns.

Then Leila’s man of honor steps up to the microphone, and the whole room stills. He’s tall, brooding, a storm cloud of a man, crackling with an unmistakable and unteachable magnetism, and racially ambiguous in the sort of way that makes me wonder whether his hair would curl if he grew it out.

My type? Not exactly; I usually like my men to be a little less pretty.

And older. Considerably older than the twenty-something years this young man has on him.

And yet here I am, working half the muscles in my face to keep saliva from oozing out of the corner of my mouth.

Questionable choice in current husband/former affair partner aside, Leila sure has some good taste.

“Hello everyone,” he says, in a deep, vaguely British-accented voice that is as smooth and sonorous as a cello’s hum. “I’m Julian.”

“Hi, Julian,” the room calls back. He smiles, almost bashful, and every person in the room sits to attention as if someone has turned a crank.

Okay so this is very inappropriate, I text Winona, after I have picked up my jaw. But Leila’s man of honor is FOINE.

Really? Winona responds. Omg. You should snatch him up. She steals my husband, my best friend steals HER best friend. It’s perfect.

I suck in my inner cheek. Yes, Julian is glorious, but not glorious enough to settle my unease.

All of these festivities, all of this money, has gone to celebrate the breakdown of Winona’s family.

Almost everyone in attendance knows her, but not one person has asked after her, skirting around her existence like she’s a Bloody Mary who will appear in the middle of the ballroom if they say her name thrice.

Only Sophie seems to serve as a reminder, her cascade of dark curls, sand-colored skin, and bulbous eyes too unlike the Pendersens’ Scandinavian features for anyone who greets her to forget their origin.

Over an elaborate crystal centerpiece, I catch my goddaughter’s eye, then throw her a thumbs-up.

Sophie sticks her tongue out at me in response: our shared signs of resistance.

A few feet away, Julian is finishing up his remarks.

His speech is pretty standard: cute anecdote about how he met Leila (age fourteen, in her high school cafeteria where he was visiting as an exchange student) and the first time he met Brandon (last year, on the North Avenue Beach volleyball court), well-wishes for the couple.

In between staring at him, making faces at Sophie, and texting Winona under the table, I miss most of it.

“And Sophia,” Julian says suddenly, turning to the head table just as Sophie uncrosses her eyes.

“I know today must be full of conflicting emotions for you. That you might feel like your dad’s happiness came at the expense of yours.

That by celebrating his new union, we are betraying your old one.

” He gives her a beatific smile, and she stares back, slack-jawed.

“My hope for you is that whatever pain you might feel right now eventually makes room for some joy. Leila might never become another mother to you, but I hope that maybe someday she might become something like a friend.”

The tense silence that follows is suffocating, like someone’s just dropped a smoke bomb into the room. It’s only interrupted by a loud clatter—my phone, sliding off my lap and onto the floor.

At the head table, Brandon tries his best to maintain his composure, but his bride takes it out of his hands.

In a slow, sweeping motion, Leila raises her glass.

“Screw you, Julian,” she says, giving him a dazzling smile.

Julian grins.

“Only in your dreams,” he says. And then he takes his seat.