What We Choose novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Golden Boy

Nash watches his boss cut the ribbon in silence and his fiancée drop her ring in his mother's champagne, tells himself he was only scared, and at midnight opens the door to Sienna and her suitcase.

Nash

Colter Gannon said it.

Sienna's my wife.

Two hundred people on the plaza turned to look at me.

I'd grown up with most of them.

My Little League coach. The guy who sold me my first truck. My mother, in her yacht club pearls, holding a champagne flute with both hands.

I was the kid they'd carried off the field after the state semifinal.

I was the one who'd left for Boston and come home.

Nobody had ever looked at me like this.

"Colter," Sienna said, and laughed again, softer. "Come on. She's sick."

He didn't answer her.

He walked to the middle of the stage, past Dessa, past his wife, and stopped at the blue ribbon.

He lifted those stupid giant scissors and cut it himself.

One clean snip.

The two halves dropped to the stone.

Nobody clapped.

He handed the scissors to a guy from accounting and came down the steps toward me.

He's a big man. I'd always liked that about working for him. You felt safe in a meeting with Colter in it.

He stopped close enough that I could smell sawdust and cologne.

"Go home, Nash."

That was all.

He didn't hit me. I almost wished he would. Then I'd be the one bleeding, and people would feel something for me.

Dessa came down the steps behind him.

She still had her planner pressed to her chest.

I said her name.

She walked right past me to my mother.

Mom's face went soft and sad, the face she makes at funerals.

"Sweetheart," she said. "You're not yourself. Let's get you somewhere quiet."

Dessa held out her closed hand over Mom's champagne flute.

She opened it.

My grandmother's ring dropped into the champagne and sank to the bottom with a little ring of bubbles.

"Tell him he can have it back," Dessa said. "And the rest of him."

My mother stared at the glass.

Dessa turned toward the parking lot.

Then she stopped, because she didn't have a car.

She'd come in mine.

I saw it hit her. Forty minutes from Boston, on a plaza full of my people, with nowhere to go.

I took a step toward her.

I could still fix this. I'd drive her home. I'd hold her while she cried, and by morning it would be the two of us against cancer again.

Colter got there first.

He said something to her, low. She shook her head. He said something else.

She looked up at him for a long second.

Then she nodded.

He walked her to the black SUV at the curb, opened the back door, and spoke to his driver.

The SUV pulled out toward the highway.

Toward Boston.

Colter stood on the curb with his hands in his pockets and watched it go.

Then he looked back at Sienna, and I watched my whole career leave his face.

Mom found me by the champagne table.

She'd fished the ring out with a cocktail napkin.

She pressed it into my palm, wet.

"Listen to me." She was smiling, for the people watching. "A sick girl does not leave the man who's taking care of her. Not really. She's scared and she's angry, and she said something crazy in public."

"Mom."

"You'll go get her tomorrow. You'll bring flowers. You'll sit with her at every one of those appointments where people can see you." Her smile didn't move. "And you will stop whatever that is with Sienna Gannon, because her husband signs your checks."

She patted my cheek and went back to her friends.

I heard her start before I was out of earshot.

"Poor Dessa. The diagnosis has just knocked her sideways."

I drove home alone.

The apartment over the pharmacy still smelled like the coffee Dessa made at six that morning.

Her slippers were by the couch.

Her pamphlets were still on the kitchen table. A pink ribbon on every cover.

I sat down and opened one.

There was a drawing of a woman's chest. A dotted line where the breast used to be.

I closed it fast.

I knew how it sounded. I knew it made me a bad person.

But I'd sat in that consult room while the doctor said bilateral, and all I could see was Dessa in my old T-shirt on a Saturday morning, and then Dessa with nothing there.

And then, God help me, Sienna. Sienna's laugh. Sienna, who'd never once made me sit in a waiting room.

I wasn't a monster.

I was twenty-eight and my fiancée had cancer, and I'd panicked, and Sienna had been kind.

Anyone would have.

I said that out loud to the empty kitchen.

It sounded true.

I texted Dessa.

Please let me explain. I love you. I'm so scared for you.

Delivered.

Not read.

I texted Sienna.

Are you ok? What did he say?

She didn't answer either.

At ten to midnight someone knocked.

I ran for the door. I thought it was Dessa. I'd already decided to cry when I saw her.

It was Sienna.

Her makeup was perfect. Her eyes were dry.

She had a rolling suitcase in one hand and a garment bag over her arm.

"He changed the locks," she said. "On my own house. While I was still at the party. He had a guy there in forty minutes."

"Jesus. Sienna."

"His lawyer emailed me at eleven." She looked past me at the slippers by the couch. "So."

She lifted the suitcase handle.

"I'm staying here."

I thought about my mother's wet napkin. About Colter's face. About Dessa's slippers.

I stepped back and held the door open.

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