He averted his eyes. “Any chance Neil will move?”
“He’s the chief of surgery. He’s been at Royaume for twenty years. I think we have a better chance of him getting struck by lightning than him going anywhere else.”
He looked back at me and sat quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry. I know the position this puts you in.”
I looked at him, hopelessness washing over me.
“You don’t know what it’s like, Derek—the way Neil chips away at me. He’ll start to gaslight me, make me feel like I deserved what he did, and I’ll get so confused and broken down and tired that I’ll let him back in out of sheer exhaustion. I have to leave, Derek. I don’t have any other way to protect myself.”
He paused for a long moment. “I have to live my life, Ali. And that’s with Nikki, doing what I know I’m meant to do.”
I put my face in my hands.
We went quiet for a long time.
“How did I not feel it?” I whispered. “How did I not know that you were falling in love and deciding something so big? I should have sensed it. It should have felt like a glitch in the matrix.”
“How did I not know Neil was hurting you until you told me?”
I sniffed and took my face from my hands, but I couldn’t look at him.
“He spent so many years taking pieces of me,” I said quietly. “I’m trying to put myself back together, and now I have to do it without you? And with him always there?”
He inched closer to the edge of the sofa. “You are strong enough for this. And all your friends are at Royaume. Don’t let him run you off. You deserve to be there if that’s where you want to be.”
Yes, my friends were there. Jessica, and Bri, and Gabby. But that didn’t outweigh having to work with Neil for the rest of my life—and it would be the rest of my life. There was no one else.
Right now Neil was playing the remorseful ex. But it wouldn’t last. Once he saw he wasn’t going to get me back, he’d switch strategies, and it would get mean.
He always got mean.
I put my face back in my hands. “Why am I the last in the dwindling Montgomery breeding program? It’s like some cruel joke.”
Mom and Dad had me and Derek for the sole purpose of continuing the family line. Bred, molded, groomed, and told from my earliest age that I was destined to work at Royaume Northwestern and I was not to take my husband’s name if I ever got married. But it wasn’t supposed to be me in the limelight. It was supposed to be Derek.
I felt a hand on my arm. “Don’t let them decide the life you’re going to live. You only get one.”
The words hung there between us. But I was too weak to pick them up.
Derek knew the truth. I had no choice in the matter now.
I’d never, ever get away.
Chapter 6
Alexis
Six days later I sat with Bri at the nurses’ station in the emergency department at Royaume Northwestern. I hadn’t seen her over the last week—mostly because we didn’t have any shared shifts, and I was too busy with my brother to talk on the phone or do the drinks we’d planned. Derek left on Saturday, back to his new wife, after telling our parents that he was leaving for good.
Dad, as expected, completely lost it.
He didn’t say it, mostly because I don’t think he had time to gather his thoughts in the chaos of Derek’s NDA and marriage announcement, but I could sense the disappointment descending on me, like he was realizing that I was all that was left of the great Montgomery/Royaume legacy, and all was to be lost.
Derek had always been the golden child, so it hadn’t mattered that I was always mildly disappointing in terms of my accomplishments. I didn’t want to publish papers in medical journals or do speaking engagements, like he did. I hated the spotlight. I just wanted to help people.
But now as the only Montgomery on staff, anything other than complete and total professional domination would be considered an embarrassment to my prestigious lineage—and I was already off to a bad start. I wasn’t a surgeon, I wasn’t pioneering any medical advancements, my face would not appear on magazine covers. It was like Dad just found out the most useless princess had ascended the throne.
Bri clicked away at her computer next to me. She was charting her patients. Her brown hair was tied up into a loose bun, and she had her stethoscope draped around her neck. She looked like the results of a Pinterest search for “beautiful physician.”
Briana Ortiz was an ER doctor like me. We’d met in med school. She was thirty-four, Salvadorean, and very good at her job.