I Regret Loving You for Five Years novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Three Red Lights
Thea leaves the country after finding Marshall's wedding invitation and being called a homewrecker in the street, and in Christchurch she peels a sticker off her station's epinephrine to find it expired fourteen months ago.
Marshall ran three red lights on the way to the airport.
My plane was already climbing over Puget Sound when he pulled up at departures.
I know because my phone lit up before we lost signal.
"Gwen says you're leaving the country. Tell me that's not true."
"Thea. Where are you going?"
"I'll put out a statement today. I'll tell everyone you're my wife. Just get off the plane."
"You can't do this to me."
"Pick up. Please. I'm begging you."
Marshall Ludlow didn't beg.
In five years I had never once heard him raise his voice.
The man next to me glanced at my screen, then politely looked out the window.
I turned the phone face down on my knee.
For one second my chest hurt.
Then it stopped.
When we landed in Los Angeles to change planes, there were forty more messages from numbers I didn't know.
I blocked six of them.
Then I bent a paper clip open, popped out my SIM card and dropped it in the trash by gate 52.
He was the one who'd asked for the divorce.
I'd only signed it.
***
Twelve days before that, it was our fifth anniversary.
Nobody knew.
Marshall and I had married at the King County courthouse on a Tuesday, with a clerk and a janitor as witnesses.
He was the younger son then, living on an allowance.
His father would have cut him off for marrying an ER resident with student loans.
"The day the Group is mine, I'll tell the world," he'd said. "I swear it."
The Group had been his for fourteen months.
I let myself into his office with my key card at lunchtime, carrying a cake from the place on Pike he liked.
He was in a meeting.
I went to put a note in his desk drawer.
There was an envelope in it, cream-colored and heavy.
Mr. Marshall Ludlow and Miss Amber Wexler request the pleasure of your company.
February 20. The Fairmont Olympic.
Under the invitation was a stapled contract.
On the wedding day, thirty percent of Ludlow Medical would go to Wexler Enterprises.
In return, Wexler would make Ludlow the only medical supplier for every polar station in the Program.
Four hundred million dollars.
I put it all back exactly the way I'd found it.
I left the cake on his desk.
I don't remember the elevator.
I remember standing on Fourth Avenue under the giant screen on the bank building.
It was playing an interview on a loop.
Marshall in a dark suit, Amber Wexler in white, her hand on his arm.
"We sat on the same charity board for two years," she was saying. "It just took him a while to notice me."
He didn't smile.
He never smiled on camera.
A man with a coffee bumped my shoulder and my sunglasses fell on the sidewalk.
I bent to get them.
A girl in a puffer jacket stared at me.
"Oh my God. It's her."
Her friend already had her phone up.
"The lobby lady. The one stalking him."
Two weeks earlier, Marshall had stopped answering me in the middle of an asthma attack.
I'd run his spare inhaler to the Ludlow tower.
His assistant called security on me.
I shouted, "I'm his," and stopped before the last word.
Somebody filmed it. Six million people had watched me stop.
"Homewrecker," the girl said, loud.
A woman pushing a stroller steered around me.
Then the tower doors opened across the street.
Marshall came out with Amber, two security men behind them.
The girl pointed. "Marshall! She's here again!"
He looked straight at me.
I said his name.
Just his name.
He turned to the nearest guard.
"I don't know her. Get her away from the building."
Amber smiled at me over his shoulder.
That night he came home late with a folder.
He laid it on the kitchen counter and lined the edges up with his thumb.
"Wexler's lawyers will find the marriage. It's paper, Thea. Two years, then I'll marry you again in front of everybody."
I read it standing up.
He held out his pen.
I didn't use it.
I took the cheap one from the junk drawer and signed every page.
He looked relieved, and then confused that I wasn't crying.
"See? We're fine," he said.
In the morning I called the Program's medical office before he woke up.
They'd offered me the winter physician job at the South Pole twice.
Both times I'd said no, because of him.
"Is it still open?" I asked.
It was.
The station closed for winter in mid-February. No planes in or out for eight and a half months.
No man on earth could buy a ticket there.
***
Christchurch was hot and smelled like cut grass.
The Program's warehouse by the airport was full of people trying on red parkas.
I had an hour before the plane to the Ice.
My medical crates were stacked by the loading door, stamped with a blue Ludlow logo.
Of course they were.
I opened one anyway, out of habit. Every ER doctor checks her own cart.
Epinephrine. Twenty boxes.
The expiry sticker on the top box was crooked.
I picked at the corner with my thumbnail.
It peeled off clean.
The date printed underneath had passed fourteen months ago.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend