My First Love Returned, His Stand-In Begged Me to Stay novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Door
Monty walks into Selah's engagement party, Kip begs her to stay, and she follows Monty outside, where he shows her a returned letter in Kip's handwriting.
My best friend dropped her champagne glass the moment Monty VanAlen walked into my engagement party.
It broke on the loft floor, and forty people stopped talking.
I was standing next to Kip with my left hand in his, and the new ring was still stiff on my finger.
Monty hadn't changed.
He was thirty now. His coat was wet from the snow, and his hair was longer than I remembered.
Six years ago he had sent me one text and vanished.
Kip didn't look surprised.
I noticed that before I noticed anything else.
Two days earlier I had asked him if Monty might ever come back, and he had said, "He won't, Selah. I'd know."
Now he looked at his phone, then at the door, and put the phone in his pocket.
"Selah," Monty said.
His voice was the same too.
"Don't you say her name in my house," Kip said.
"It's a party," Monty said. "I'm told there's an announcement."
He looked at the ring on my hand, and his face went still.
"I looked for you for six years," he said. "I wrote to you, over and over, that first year."
"You sent me one text," I said. "It said you couldn't do this anymore."
"I didn't send that."
The room was so quiet I could hear the radiator.
"I sent letters," Monty said. "Six of them. Come outside and I'll show you. Five minutes. That's all I'm asking."
Bree, my best friend, took one step toward me, then stopped, because everyone was watching.
I looked at Kip.
Kip had been my person for six years. He drove me to my mother's grave every March. He fixed my sink, and he read to me every night in the dark, one hand in mine, because I fell asleep faster with the lamp off.
He had told every guest tonight about the reading, with his glass raised.
Everyone had laughed and said how sweet it was.
I had laughed with them, and I had pulled his left hand against my side the way I always did.
He was holding my hand so tightly now that it hurt.
His palm was rough along one ridge, an old scar I had stopped noticing years ago.
"Don't go out there," he said.
"Kip."
"Please." His voice cracked on it. "Stay. I'm asking you to stay."
Kip had never begged me for anything. He didn't ask for the last slice of cake.
Forty people watched him do it with his jaw shaking.
"Why?" I said.
He opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
That was the answer. It was also the last thing I needed to hear.
I took my hand out of his.
"Five minutes," I told Monty.
"Selah," Kip said behind me.
I didn't turn around.
I put my glass down on the nearest table, walked past Monty, and opened the door myself.
So I went out.
The stairwell was cold and smelled like wet wool. The light over the landing buzzed.
Monty shut the door behind us and stood there with snow melting off his shoulders.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Through the door we could hear the party start up again, low and careful, with nobody quite laughing.
"You're really engaged to him," he said.
"Two months," I said. "Show me the letters."
"I only brought one. The rest are in my hotel room."
He took a flat envelope from inside his coat. It was soft with age, and he held it out like it might hurt me.
There was a stamp in the corner, and a postmark from Zurich.
Across the front, in blue ink, someone had written: RETURN TO SENDER.
It was addressed to me, at the apartment I shared with Kip.
I knew the handwriting.
I had seen it on grocery lists and birthday cards and every note left on our fridge for six years.
"Monty," I said. "That's Kip's writing."
"I know," he said. "There are five more."
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