My Husband Sold Our Perfect Marriage on Tour, So I Ended It on Stage novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Ninety-Four Nights
My husband renews our proposal on stage, his second phone lights up with another woman's name on a thirty-foot screen, and I say yes anyway.
At the nineteenth show of the Devoted Tour, my husband read my love letter to two thousand strangers and made half of them cry.
I stood in the wings of the Marlowe Theatre in Columbus with my hands folded in front of my green wrap dress.
I knew every word of the letter.
I had written it six years ago, the week I woke up, and polished it for the book.
Brendan stood at the lectern under a single warm light.
He held the paper.
"She wrote me this the week she woke up," he said.
His voice cracked in the same place it cracked every night.
"I sat in a chair beside her bed for ninety-four nights, and I never once wanted to be anywhere else."
The audience made the soft sound I had learned to hear as money.
Behind him, a thirty-foot screen showed his face in close-up, wet-eyed and kind.
That was the tour.
Twenty-four cities, two thousand seats a night, and a man everyone wanted to be married to.
I was the wife in the wings.
My cue was the ring.
Every night he called me out, got down on one knee, and asked me to choose him again.
Every night I said yes, and the crowd stood up.
I was good at it.
I had written that part too.
"You can come out whenever you're ready, Roz," the stage manager whispered in my ear.
That was Jack.
I couldn't have told you the color of his eyes after six weeks of working beside him.
He was a voice on a headset and a pair of big hands that carried my coat.
I was watching the lectern.
Something small lit up on it.
A phone sat face down beside Brendan's water glass, and its edge glowed.
Then it flipped over by itself, nudged by his elbow.
I knew that phone.
It was not the phone he gave out for press.
It was a gray one he kept in his jacket, and I had never seen the screen.
The camera caught it.
I watched the thirty-foot screen cut from his face to his hands, and the lectern, and the glowing glass.
For one second, two thousand people could read it.
"Can't wait to see what you're wearing after the show. T."
A woman in the front row laughed, because she thought it was a joke from a sponsor.
The picture on the screen jumped away to a wide shot of the whole stage.
Someone had cut the feed.
Jack's voice crackled in my headset, low and fast.
"Roz. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was a second late."
I did not answer him.
Brendan had not seen the screen.
He had not seen anything.
He turned the phone face down with two fingers, and he smiled into the light.
"Roz," he said. "Where is she? Where's my beautiful wife?"
The crowd clapped.
I stood very still.
I had a choice, and it was not a long one.
I could walk onto that stage and throw the phone at his head.
I could take the microphone and read the message out loud.
I could do what the woman I had been for eight years would never have done.
And then he would cry, and call it a misunderstanding, and two thousand people would hand him a hug.
He had spent four years teaching them how to forgive him.
I had written the chapter on it.
So I took one breath through my nose.
I walked out into the light.
The applause came up over me.
Brendan took my hand.
He sank to one knee, in the navy suit I had picked out in March, and held up the ring we had bought together in a pawn shop.
"Rosalind Penhallow," he said. "Eight years ago I chose you. Tonight I'm asking again."
"Will you choose me back?"
I looked at his face.
There was no one in it.
I took the microphone from his other hand.
"Yes," I said.
The room came apart in cheering.
I pulled him up, and I kissed him in front of two thousand people, and I smiled the whole time.
His mouth tasted like peppermint and somebody else's lipstick.
Backstage, a hand touched my elbow in the dark.
It was Jack, with his headset around his neck.
He had a nice voice for a man I'd never looked at.
"You saw it," he said.
"Everybody saw it," I said. "Nobody understood it."
"I did," he said. "I've known for three cities."
I turned around.
His eyes were brown, I noticed, and he did not look away.
"He books a second suite in every city," Jack said. "It's under her name. I carry her bags up."
My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
"Suite 1412," he said. "Tonight. She's already up there."
"Do you want to see?"
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