Chapter Two
Two
Once the lights dimmed for the reception, I excuse myself from the festivities, lingering in the ballroom just long enough to see Brandon’s dad spin Sophie onto the dance floor to ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me.” My mind shuttles to what feels like a lifetime ago: Winona, Brandon, and I meeting for dinner during residency.
Somehow Brandon and I had been placed on the same cardiology rotation, and on a schedule that would allow us to see each other to boot.
And so we gathered—Brandon pre-call, me exhausted and post-call, Winona post–proposal defense for her psychology PhD program—around the peeling dining room table we’d garbage-picked three years before, inhaling Taco Bell soft shells between complaints about our micromanaging preceptors.
Halfway through her Crunchwrap Supreme, Winny suddenly braced herself against the table, then excused herself into the bathroom.
Brandon and I exchanged a concerned look as he raced after her.
It took ten minutes for them to emerge, and when they did, they wore identical expressions: shell-shocked but ecstatic.
“Food poisoning?” I asked.
“Worse,” Winny said. Then she held out a hand, turning over her fist to reveal a positive pregnancy test. Her eyes welled with tears, and Brandon buried his fingers in her curls to press an adoring kiss to her forehead. “You’ll be godmother, obviously. If all goes well.”
“Obviously!” I cried, standing up to pull both of them into a hug. Our tears intermixed, three and a half bodies pressed close, nothing between us but love.
And now the “food poisoning” is twelve years old and that love has been snatched away and repackaged for someone else, and here I am, meant to celebrate it all.
At least she hasn’t stopped grinning since Julian’s speech. I take that as a signal that she’s doing well enough that I can afford myself a moment.
I’m wandering around the venue, I text Sophie. Plan to head home at 8?
7:30, Sophie says, ever the negotiator.
Deal, I agree. One hour more. I’ve burned an hour in worse places than my best friend’s ex-husband’s wedding, and I know exactly where I want to spend it.
I sweep past the swinging doors that house the kitchen, the pink-wallpapered parlor room, down a short flight of carved cherrywood stairs.
Already the sounds of the festivities are behind me, the thrumming of the bass guitar fading to a hum in my feet.
Finally I arrive at a closed oak door that I’m sure marks my destination.
Looking left and right, I turn the key still stuck in the ornate handle, silently rejoicing at the click of its opening. Then, quick as a cat, I slip inside.
The room is large and cluttered; old, wrapped furniture is pushed into a pile on the side opposite a window.
I shake out the heavy curtains before throwing them wide open, wincing as golden sunlight spills inside and shrouds my target: a beautiful Steinway and Sons grand piano.
I first caught a glimpse of it through this window the night before when I dropped off Sophie at the venue for the rehearsal dinner and thought, Poor thing. I bet no one touches it.
I bet correctly. The layer of dust on its lid is thick as a carpet, and when I blow it off, it peels away in tendrils. I lift the fallboard and run my fingers over the keys. To my surprise, it’s in tune.
A surge of excitement rushes through me as I pull out the bench.
In terms of poor wedding guest etiquette, sneaking away from the reception to play the grand piano tucked away in a hidden room in the venue is probably minor, but it still feels like a thrill.
My fingers flex above the keys, and I let them decide what song to play.
They choose Chopin’s “Prelude in E Minor.” In the still room, each keystroke feels like a stab into the silence.
Suddenly I’m no longer in Edison Mansion, a few hundred feet away from a rip-roaring reception, but in a fishbowl-shaped world of my own making.
I transition into Lianne La Havas’s “Lost & Found,” delighting in the responsiveness of the keys, the creak of the pedals underfoot, the sight of the recently disturbed dust still swirling in the orange light of the sunset.
I close my eyes, moving by muscle memory, singing its melancholic melody over the music.
Suddenly, an intrusion: an elegant chord progression that harmonizes beautifully with mine. Except I didn’t produce it. My body recognizes danger before my mind can grasp it, and my hips reflexively push the bench backward in a bid to escape.
“Sorry to interrupt,” the man who has just joined me says, straightening. “I heard you playing, and I couldn’t help myself.”
As my vision clears, I put him together. A shorn head, bronze skin, long, elegant legs that end in spotless brown leather oxfords, shoulders that seem broader now that they’ve been freed from their burgundy suit jacket.
Leila’s best man, Julian, is looking down at me.
During his speech, I’d been so sure that his eyes were dark brown, but in the light of the setting sun they take on a different hue—amber, maybe even green.
His lashes are long and doelike, his features a clash of feminine softness in the lips and masculine angularity in the shape of his face.
I think, numbly, that he might be the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen this close.
“It’s okay,” I say, adjusting the front of my jumpsuit. Now that I’ve convinced my body that we were not just in the midst of an assault, I’m embarrassed by my reaction. “I just. Um. Thought I was alone.”
Julian settles onto the bench next to me, his shoulders knocking against mine, and I stiffen, bewildered by his presumptuousness. He smells unexpectedly sweet, like vanilla and bourbon.
“Well, you aren’t anymore.” He lays his right hand gingerly over the keys. “Start again?”
My curiosity gets the better of me. I start the song from the top, and he weaves in his improvisations fluidly.
I can’t remember the last time I played like this with another person, making music just for the love of it, feeling them respond to the minute changes in my tempo with their own.
I learn more about Julian in one song than I would have in the kind of inoffensive conversation a wedding would require: that he’s bold and brash and not afraid to try new things, that he’s inventive and creative—and really freaking talented, considering I’ve probably been playing for longer than he’s been alive.
When the song is done, we turn to each other, grinning in the resonant silence, strangers no more.
“I liked your speech earlier,” I confess.
“Did you?” Julian says, raising an eyebrow. “Didn’t think you heard it. You were on your phone the whole time.”
My jaw drops, stuck between embarrassment that he’d noticed me and astonishment because, well, he’d noticed me.
“You were watching me, huh,” I say.
Julian turns to face me, the corners of his eyes crinkling in a smile that ends before it can reach his mouth.
“You’re a very beautiful woman who wasn’t paying attention to me,” he explains plainly. He doesn’t give me a second to recover from the first shock before delivering a second. “It’s Sean, right?”
I raise an eyebrow.
“How do you know my name?”
The melody Julian plays now is lilting and familiar.
“Maybe I did a little recon,” he says. “Maybe I planned for us to meet like this all along.” When I give him a blank stare, he grins. “Okay, fine. Brandon’s mentioned you.”
The reminder of why Julian and I are one degree removed slaps me back into reality.
Of course. He’s the best man of Brandon’s new wife, a player in his new life.
I imagine Leila, Brandon, and Julian sharing a drink after their beach volleyball game, Brandon complaining about me taking sides, like I’d once overheard him doing with our colleague Shiv in the cath lab reading room.
“Interesting,” I say, finally.
“All good things,” Julian assures me.
“Not sure I can say the same for him,” I mumble under my breath.
Julian laughs again.
“Well, as you might remember, my name’s Julian,” he says, holding out a hand for me to shake. I take it. It is unexpectedly soft, but its grip is firm. “And I know it’s not good to speak ill of the groom, but I don’t blame you.”
An age-old reflex to defend Brandon springs to my mind, and I bite my tongue and push it down.
For so many years, I’d fielded complaints about Brandon’s sometimes prickly nature with an “I know he seems like a hardass, but he’s actually a good person,” comforted the residents who came to me after he’d reamed them out with assurances that he was harmless.
Because he was. He cried when his favorite clinic patients died and bought breakfasts for the trainees who worked weekends in the ICU.
Kept an eye out for the learners who looked confused but were too scared to voice it and took special care to go over a topic until everyone in the room had absorbed it.
Organized a committee of guys to move me out of the apartment my ex and I shared in six hours flat and build my IKEA furniture in my new studio.
He’d been, for the most part, a good man. I’m not sure when that changed. If it did, or if, as Krause had said, he’d just gone and found true love in the messiest way possible.
I close my eyes. I’m exhausted. If Sophie and I didn’t have an hour-and-a-half-long drive home in front of us, I might have liked another glass of wine.
“Well. This was lovely. But I think I should probably start heading home.”
I try to push out the bench to leave, but it’s stuck, set firm by Julian’s counterweight.
“Did I upset you?” Julian says innocently, as if he isn’t intentionally keeping me captive. “I didn’t mean to.”
“No, I just—” I start.
“Then forget why you’re here,” Julian interrupts. “And play with me some more.”
If there was any doubt in my mind that Julian is hitting on me, it’s obliterated by the command in his stare. His eyes are golden now, lupine. From so close, they’re a vortex, sucking me in.