Bye, Mr. Ex! novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
At the Group awards dinner Colby toasts the night he carried a man from a fire while Sadie, whose anniversary dinner he forgot, drops her ring in his glass in front of the room.
Colby raised his glass and told two hundred people he had carried a man out of a fire.
I stood at the back of the ballroom with a cake box in my hands.
I had driven to Fort Bragg because his truck was still in the club lot at ten o'clock.
He had told me this dinner was for team members only, no guests, no fiancées.
There was a woman in a blue dress sitting at his elbow with her hand on his sleeve.
"Seven years ago tonight," Colby said, "a truck burned on a road in Syria, and I went in after a brother."
The room went quiet.
He had a gift for that.
"I didn't think about it. You don't. You just go."
Behind him, on the wall, a screen showed a photo of a young lieutenant with a bandaged arm.
Everyone clapped.
I did not clap.
My hands had gone cold, and I was counting my breath, in for four, out for four.
That was a habit from a long time ago, from a job I used to be good at.
Six years ago tonight, one year to the day after the fire, he had asked me to marry him.
I had set a table for two at home with candles and his mother's good plates.
I had cooked the pot roast he liked and kept it warm for three hours.
He had not texted once.
I walked down the center aisle between the round tables.
A few heads turned, and a woman in sequins whispered, "Is that his fiancée?"
Colby saw me when I was ten feet away.
His smile held for a full second, and then it slipped.
"Sade," he said, quietly, and then loudly, for the room, "Babe. This is a surprise."
"It's our anniversary," I said.
He blinked.
I watched him do the math, and I watched him fail it.
"That's tomorrow," he said.
"It was tonight, Colby."
The woman at his elbow took her hand off his sleeve and put it in her lap.
She was young, polished, with a pearl necklace and a face that had never been told no.
"Who's this?" I asked him.
"Whitney," he said. "The Colonel's daughter. She's just a guest."
"I thought this dinner had no guests."
"Sadie." He stood up, and his voice dropped to the warm, reasonable one he used on his mother.
"You're making a scene. Go home. We'll talk about it there."
"I have been home," I said. "For three hours. Next to a roast."
Somebody laughed and stopped.
Colby reached for my elbow, and I stepped back.
"You gave up playing medic to keep our house," he said, low and fast. "Don't make me regret saying thank you."
Playing medic.
Seven years, and that was the word he had settled on.
I looked at the Silver Star on his chest.
Then I took off my grandmother's ring.
It slid off my finger the way it always had, a little loose, because I had never gotten it sized.
I picked up the champagne glass he had just raised to his own story.
I dropped the ring in it.
It made a small sound against the crystal.
"Happy anniversary," I said.
"Sadie, don't do this in front of the Colonel."
"Then you should have remembered it in front of me."
Nobody moved.
I put the cake box on the head table next to the centerpiece.
It said HAPPY SIX YEARS in blue icing, and it had taken me two hours.
I turned and walked out through the double doors with two hundred people watching my back.
In the hallway the air was cooler, and my legs finally began to shake.
I leaned on the wall beside a display case of old unit flags and shut my eyes.
"In for four," I whispered. "Out for four."
I did it again.
"In for four."
A chair scraped inside the ballroom.
The doors opened behind me, and someone stepped out into the hall and stopped.
I did not turn around.
I heard him breathe in once, sharp.
He was the guest of honor in the photograph on the screen, the lieutenant from the fire, a captain now.
He stood very still, one hand pressed to the scar on his forearm.
"Say that again," Captain Swafford said.
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