The Imperfect Marriage novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
Dagny catches her fiancé with her maid of honor, takes the microphone at the rehearsal dinner and drops her ring in his champagne; outside, a stranger offers her a fourteen-day marriage.
I was forty minutes late to my own rehearsal dinner because a patient on my ward had stopped breathing at six.
He started again at six-fifteen.
I am a respiratory therapist, and that is the kind of thing that happens on a Friday.
I ran into the Canal Park restaurant still in my scrubs, with my wedding dress bag over my arm and my hair coming out of its knot.
Sixty guests sat at long tables under strings of lights.
Nobody was in the dining room doorway to meet me.
I went to the coat room to change.
The door was already shut, and a light was on behind it.
I heard a woman laugh.
It was Faith, my maid of honor, whom I had known since we were nine.
"She'll be late," Faith said. "Eleven weeks and she hasn't noticed once. Hurry."
Then I heard my fiancé's voice, low and pleased.
"Take that off. I want to see the dress you're not wearing tomorrow."
I opened the door.
Lowell had Faith up against the coat rack, with her bridesmaid dress unzipped to the waist.
His hand was on her bare back.
For a second nobody moved.
Then Lowell sighed.
"Dagny. You weren't supposed to see that."
Faith pulled her dress up and did not even look ashamed.
"It just happened," she said.
"Eleven weeks," I said. "I saw the texts on his watch last month and told myself I was being crazy."
"Don't make this a scene," Lowell said.
He stepped toward me, and his voice dropped to the one he used when my father's name came up.
"Think, Dag. The clinic wants three hundred eighty thousand dollars in advance. I'm the only one who can get you that money, and I get it after we're married. Not before."
"You promised it before."
"I promised a lot of things."
He smiled at me.
"Your dad needs that pump by Friday week or he's on the transplant list with a coin flip. So go in there, smile, and eat the chicken."
I looked at the man I had planned to marry.
Then I took off the ring.
I walked past him, past Faith, down the hall and into the dining room.
The best man was in the middle of a toast, holding a microphone.
I took it out of his hand.
Sixty faces turned to me.
"Sorry I'm late," I said. "I was at work. Lowell was not."
Somebody laughed nervously.
"I walked in on him with Faith in the coat room. Eleven weeks, she says."
The room went silent.
Lowell came through the doorway behind me, fast.
"She's exhausted, everybody. She's overworked. Dagny, give me the mic."
"He also told me he would pay for my father's heart pump after the wedding," I said. "And not before."
Faith's mother put her hand over her mouth.
Lowell grabbed my wrist.
"Sit down," he said under his breath. "Without me your father dies. Do you understand that? You have nothing."
I looked at his hand until he let go.
I walked to the head table.
I dropped the ring into his glass of champagne, where it sank.
"Congratulations," I said. "Eat the chicken."
Then I put the microphone down and walked out through sixty people.
I made it as far as the sidewalk.
Cold wind came off the lake, and I realized I had left my coat, my keys and my phone charger inside.
I also realized I had no plan at all for the three hundred eighty thousand dollars.
My knees started to shake.
A hand held a long wool coat out beside me.
It was Ross Stenbeck, who owned the shipyard where Lowell worked, and who had sat at the end of the head table all night saying nothing.
He was thirty-seven, six foot two, dark hair going grey at the temples, in a suit that fit him very well.
I had met him twice.
"Put it on," he said.
I put it on because I was freezing.
He looked back at the restaurant window, where Lowell was pulling the ring out of his glass.
Then he looked at me, very steadily.
"Marry me instead," Ross said. "It's fourteen days, and I'll pay for your father's pump tonight."
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