My Best Friend Changed Boyfriends Weekly... Until She Chose My Ten-Year Fiancé novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Boyfriend of the Week
At the gate, Ginny sees Mallory post Edgar as her new boyfriend of the week, walks to the rooftop, ends ten years in front of forty people, and gets a text from Mallory telling her to delete nothing.
At gate B14, with my boarding pass in my hand, I watched my best friend post my fiancé as her new boyfriend.
The photo was already at nine hundred likes.
Mallory sat on a rooftop bar stool in a gold dress, laughing at the camera.
Edgar's arm was around her waist, and his hand was tucked in the curve of her hip.
The caption said, "New boyfriend for the week. Like this post and he's yours next."
Mallory had changed boyfriends every Monday since we were nineteen.
I had posed with at least fifty of them.
I had never once worried, because she had never once looked at Edgar.
Edgar and I had been together ten years.
He had given me a small old diamond when I was twenty and said we'd pick a date next year.
He had said that every year since.
My phone buzzed in my hand.
It was Edgar.
"Safe flight, babe. Client dinner is dull without you. Love you."
The text was stamped 6:41.
The post was stamped 6:41.
I stood there while the line for Denver shuffled past me.
My sister was having a baby shower tomorrow, and I had a seat in row nine.
The gate agent called my group number.
I looked at the geotag under the photo.
The Arden, River North.
It was forty minutes away without traffic.
I stepped out of the line.
"Ma'am, we're closing the door in ten minutes," the gate agent said.
"I know," I said. "I'm not going."
In the cab I wrote back to Edgar.
"Where's the client dinner?"
He answered in under a minute.
"Downtown. Boring. Don't worry about me. Text when you land."
The cab driver watched me in his mirror and didn't say a word the whole way.
The Arden's rooftop was glass and heat lamps and a long white table.
There were about forty people at it, and I knew most of them.
My nursing school friends. Edgar's golf friends. Mallory's roommate from sophomore year.
Edgar's mother, Diane, sat at the foot in her pearls, cutting a strawberry into very small pieces.
At the far end sat a man I didn't know, in a work jacket, who was the only person not smiling.
Someone had said his name was Willem, and that he'd been Mallory's boyfriend last week.
A cake sat in the middle with sparklers burning down in it.
Across the top, in blue icing, it said, "Week 1 of Forever."
Edgar stood at the head of the table with his arm around Mallory.
He saw me before she did.
He didn't move his arm.
Then he smiled at me, the same easy smile he'd used on my mother for ten years.
"Gin, there you are." He said it warmly, like I'd come in from the cold. "You missed your flight, you poor thing."
"I did," I said.
The talking stopped.
Someone near the bar lifted a phone to film me.
Mallory turned around.
She had her camel coat on over the gold dress, buttoned to the neck, although the heat lamps were roaring.
She took her phone out of her clutch, leaned it against a champagne glass, and pointed it at the two of us.
"Okay," she said. "Go ahead, Ginny."
I looked at the girl who had held my hair back in a dorm bathroom, who had sat with me through my father's funeral, who had stood next to me at every birthday for ten years.
"You post a new man every week," I said. "I thought that was a joke."
"It isn't a joke this time."
"He's engaged to me."
"He's not engaged to anyone," Mallory said. "He's at a dinner."
She glanced at Edgar, and she kept that champagne glass perfectly still.
"Keep talking, Edgar," she said. "Tell her about the client dinner."
Edgar let out a short laugh and let go of her waist.
"Gin, come on. It's a bit. It's the Friday bit, you know how Mal is. Nobody's taking it seriously."
"Then why did you text me you were at a dinner?"
"I was going to be."
"At 6:41," I said. "While you stood here."
Forty people looked at their drinks.
I pulled the ring off my finger.
It came off hard, the way it always had, because he'd bought it a size too small and called it romantic.
I set it down on the white tablecloth next to the cake.
"I'm not going to Denver," I said. "I'm going home. Mallory, you can have his Fridays. You can have all of them."
Edgar said, "Ginny, don't do this in front of people."
"You did it in front of people."
I walked to the elevator.
Behind me a chair scraped, and a man's voice said quietly, "I've got it."
It was Willem, and he had picked up my ring.
I pushed the button three times and watched the numbers come down.
My phone buzzed.
It wasn't Edgar.
It was Mallory, who was thirty feet away and hadn't moved.
"Don't answer anything he sends you tonight. Not a word. Delete nothing."
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