The Night Before We Got Married novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Not Your Wife

Romy refuses Desmond in front of the whole audition, names who got her scar treatment, wins the burned sister's part, and a fire investigator stops her at the stage door to say he's the one who really carried her out.

Every head in the house turned to look at him.

The women from the lobby had crept in at the back to watch. A few of them knew his face from the business pages.

The untempted tycoon. No drink, no women, no scandal.

"I'm not getting in the car, Desmond."

My voice carried. I let it.

He kept his hands in his coat pockets.

"You're upset. We'll talk at home."

"I don't have a home with you."

"Romy."

He said my name.

"We'll reschedule city hall for Monday. I've already called them."

"Then call them back."

Somebody in the back row laughed and turned it into a cough.

Delphine stood up from her seat beside the director.

Her eyes were already full.

"Please don't do this here," she whispered. "Not because of me. I'm not well, Romy. You know I'm not well."

She pressed her right hand flat against her chest.

That hand.

Seven years ago it had come out of the fire burned across the back, the same as my arm. I remembered the gauze on it.

Now the skin was smooth as a peeled egg.

"You look well," I said.

"How can you..."

"Desmond's family paid for a scar clinic," I said to the room. "They ran a trial. It had exactly one slot."

Delphine's mouth opened.

"I was told I didn't qualify."

I held up my left arm.

The whole house looked at it.

"Somebody did qualify."

Every eye in the room went from my arm to her hand.

Delphine put her right hand behind her back.

She did it fast.

It was the only true thing she'd done all morning.

Desmond's jaw tightened.

"That's enough."

"It really is," I said.

I came down the steps at the side of the stage.

I walked right up to him in the aisle.

Up close he smelled like hotel soap.

In my coat pocket was the black fob for the penthouse elevator. I'd found it there on the bus last night.

I took it out and put it in his hand.

"I left the key on the counter. This is the last one."

He looked at the fob.

"You have nowhere to go."

"I have a couch."

"Romy, you have nothing. No family. No work. You haven't been on a stage in seven years."

"Ten minutes ago I was."

The director cleared her throat.

She hadn't stood up. She was still holding her legal pad.

"Mr. Holcombe. With respect, the foundation pays for my building. It doesn't run my auditions."

Desmond turned his head and looked at her.

People usually went quiet when he did that.

She didn't.

"Ms. Tilney," she said. "The part of Mara is yours, if you want it."

Delphine made a small sound.

"You can't just..."

"I can. It's in my contract. Casting is mine."

"She's not stable," Delphine said. "Everyone knows what happened to her. She can't handle the lights."

"She just handled them." The director looked at me over her glasses. "Well?"

"I want it."

"Rehearsal starts Monday. Read-through at ten."

That was it.

No speech. No applause.

She made a single note on her legal pad and underlined it.

Desmond looked at me one more time.

I didn't drop my eyes.

Then Delphine took his arm.

She took it the way she'd taken it in that hotel room, both hands, like she was drowning.

"Des. Please. I need to get out of here."

He let her lead him back up the aisle.

He didn't look back.

The doors swung shut behind them.

"Host," said the System. "Target 4 affection: 3."

I stood in the aisle of the Sterling Theater and stared at nothing.

Three.

It had been zero for seven years.

Zero the night he proposed. Zero on every birthday. Zero the morning he held my hand while the nurse changed my dressings.

It took me walking out in front of forty strangers to get him to three.

I laughed.

It came out loud and wrong and I couldn't stop it.

The girl with the gum stared at me from the back row.

"Sorry," I said. "Long week."

"It's Friday morning," she said.

"Long week."

I signed the cast sheet in the stage manager's office with a pen that kept skipping.

Then I went out the back way, because I didn't want to walk past the billboard.

The stage door was steel and painted red. It opened onto an alley full of puddles.

A man was standing just outside it, looking up at the new sprinkler pipe over the frame.

He was big. Broad across the shoulders, with close-cut brown hair and a short beard.

He wore a navy jacket with MFD on the back.

He had a clipboard and a flashlight and the expression of a man who'd been in this alley a while.

He lowered the flashlight when he saw me.

He looked at my arm. Not the way the women in the lobby had.

He looked at it.

"Romy Tilney," he said.

It wasn't a question.

"Do I know you?"

He tilted his head toward the street, where Delphine's face was glowing thirty feet high.

"That billboard's a lie," he said. "I'm the one who carried you out."

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