The Night Before We Got Married novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: One Hundred Sixty-Nine
The night before Romy and Desmond register their marriage, his ring shows his heart racing beside the woman who burned her, so Romy accepts the System's offer to die in thirty days, throws away the ring, walks out, and sees that woman's face on a billboard claiming she saved her.
The night before Desmond and I were going to city hall to get married, my ring buzzed against my finger.
Abnormal heart rate: 169.
It wasn't my heart. The ring was paired to his.
Desmond's heart never went above seventy. Not on planes, not in board meetings, not the night he asked me to marry him.
My hands shook so hard I dropped the phone twice before the video call went through.
He picked up on the fourth ring.
The camera was pointed at a hotel carpet.
His prayer beads were all over it. A hundred and eight dark sandalwood beads, scattered.
A little silver ring lay among them, catching the lamp.
Then the phone tilted up.
Delphine Sorrell was in his arms.
She was wearing his black shirt and nothing else. Her eyes were red and wet.
Desmond pulled the shirt closed over her chest.
"It's all right," he said to her, very softly.
He used to say it to me like that. At the door, with his suitcase, every time he left on a trip.
Delphine looked into the camera.
"Romy, you get him tomorrow. You get him forever. Why can't I have this one night?"
Desmond frowned at me.
"Delphine has depression. Don't push her. We'll still get married tomorrow."
My throat closed up.
"Why her?"
He didn't answer.
The System did.
It was a flat voice in the middle of my head, the one I'd been hearing since I was nineteen.
"Host. Seven years ago, Delphine Sorrell lit the fire at the Sterling Theater."
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
"The clinic's scar trial had one slot. You were told you didn't qualify. Desmond gave the slot to her."
I looked down at my left arm.
The skin from my neck to my elbow was shiny and ridged.
On the screen, Delphine's right hand rested on his chest. Smooth. Perfect.
I made a fist.
"Aren't you going to explain any of this?"
Desmond didn't deny one word of it.
"Delphine's life can't be ruined," he said.
"So mine can?"
He sighed. He actually sighed.
"Romy, don't fixate. You'll still be my wife. I've been with you for seven years. I've given you everything I could, except love."
He brushed Delphine's hair back with his thumb.
"Isn't that enough?"
It was.
It was exactly enough to wake me up.
I was not from this world.
In my own world, I drowned in a lake when I was nineteen. I woke up on the shore of Lake Harriet in Minneapolis, alive, with no family and no past.
The System gave me one rule. Be loved in this world within ten years, or leave it.
It gave me four men to try. It called them routes.
The first three failed by the time I was twenty-two.
Then the theater burned with me inside it, and Desmond Holcombe sat by my hospital bed every single day.
He was the fourth.
He was the last.
"Host," the System said. "All four capture-target routes have failed. Would you like to exit this world by dying?"
I looked at the beads on the carpet.
"Yes," I said.
Desmond thought I was talking to him. His face relaxed.
"Good. Be good, Romy. I'll be home in the morning and we'll go straight to..."
"No need."
I pulled the ring off my finger.
It was still blinking. One sixty-four. One sixty.
I dropped it in the wastebasket by the dresser.
"I'm not going to city hall, Desmond. Not tomorrow. Not ever."
Delphine's mouth fell open.
"These seven years were bad luck," I said. "We're even now."
I ended the call.
The rain was loud on the penthouse windows.
That was the only sound left.
The ring glowed at the bottom of the wastebasket, a little screen blinking in the dark.
I didn't look at it again.
"Exit accepted," the System said. "Thirty days. You may choose the place."
"Lake Harriet," I said. "Where I came in."
"Midnight on the thirtieth day. Confirmed."
I went into the walk-in closet.
The white dress hung by itself at the end of the rail, in a garment bag with a tag from a store on Nicollet.
Desmond had picked it himself.
He said we didn't need anything fancy to register a marriage. Just something simple and clean.
It had a high collar and long sleeves.
Of course it did.
I carried it out over my arm.
"Host," said the System. "Are you sure you want to leave?"
I didn't answer right away.
The hallway lights were all on. The carpet was cream, and he'd never let me wear shoes on it.
I wore my shoes on it.
At the end of the hall was the trash chute.
I opened the little steel door and fed the white dress in, bag and hanger and all.
It hissed down nineteen floors.
Then I packed one suitcase.
Two sweaters. My good boots. The script from the last play I ever did, with my lines highlighted in yellow.
I left everything else he'd bought me on the bed.
I left my key on the kitchen counter, next to his coffee machine.
Downstairs, the doorman looked at my suitcase, then at my face, then at the clock.
"Miss Tilney? It's almost midnight. Isn't tomorrow the big day?"
"It was," I said.
He held the door.
The rain soaked me to the skin almost instantly.
I texted Goldie. "Can I sleep on your couch?"
She wrote back instantly. "Who do I have to kill?"
I laughed out loud on the empty sidewalk.
I was walking to the bus stop on Hennepin when the billboard across the street flickered on.
It was brand new. They must have been testing the lights.
It hung on the side of the Sterling Theater, the place I hadn't let myself walk past in seven years.
THE STERLING IS BACK.
Under it was a woman's face, thirty feet tall, honey-blond and glowing.
Delphine.
Under her face, in gold letters, was a line from a book with her name on it.
"I carried my best friend out of the fire."
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