“So,” Bri said, “are you going to tell me what happened? The rumor mill’s chugging out a story that Derek quit?” She did a final tap and turned to me.
I looked at her over my reading glasses. “It’s not a rumor.”
“They’re also saying he was wearing a wedding ring.” She gave me a raised eyebrow.
“That I cannot discuss,” I said, doing my own final tap on my keyboard. “I signed an NDA.”
“Your own brother made you sign an NDA,” she deadpanned.
“He did. It’s been a whole week of firsts.”
A nurse came out of room four. “Nunchuck Guy’s here. Again.”
I groaned.
“Send him to CT,” we called in unison. Bri looked back at me. “So what’d you do all week?”
I sighed. “Hung out with Derek and my parents. We went to that new restaurant in Wayzata on Friday, and Mom decided it was the time and place to give me her Team Neil speech about going with him to couple’s counseling. Said he deserves a second chance. I feel like he’s asking people to talk to me. This is the second attempted intervention this week.”
“The man boned an anesthesiologist. Who you have to work with. What doesn’t your family get?”
I rubbed my temple tiredly. It wasn’t just Neil’s cheating. Bri and Derek were the only ones who knew the real reason why I wasn’t giving him another chance. Bri wouldn’t pee on Neil if he was on fire after what he’d put me through the last couple of years.
But everyone else? Everyone loved Neil. My parents, our friends. He was the life of the party, everyone’s buddy.
“I mean, they all started off sympathetic enough,” I mumbled. “How could he? I hope you threw him out on his ass. Blah blah blah. But then Jessica’s birthday came up and everyone went to the lake house, and Neil and I weren’t there, and I think it finally started to hit everyone that life as we all knew it for the last seven years is over. Then it suddenly flipped to, Well, have you considered counseling? It was just that one woman, he made a mistake and he knows it. I think he’s sleeping on a futon at Cam’s,” I added wearily.
Bri made a disgusted noise. “The man’s a surgeon. He’s gotta sleep on his twenty-two-year-old’s sofa? He can’t get a damn apartment?”
“I think the second he does, this whole thing suddenly becomes real.”
“Good. I hope his dick shrivels up and falls off. For real.” She picked up her iced coffee. “What did your dad say about it?” she asked, talking around the straw.
“It’s going to piss you off,” I warned.
“Tell me.”
“He said that Neil is brilliant and that sometimes brilliant people make mundane mistakes.”
She scoffed. “Yeah, well, you’re brilliant too, and I don’t see you humping anesthesiologists.”
“He also said he hopes I come to my senses soon because the summer holidays are coming up.”
“He didn’t.” She gasped.
“Oh, yeah. He did. And Derek left me alone, trapped for three days in Cedar Rapids with this.”
“I want to cage fight your whole family.”
I snorted. “Yeah, me too.”
“Why didn’t you just tell your dad to go to hell?”
My laugh was for a joke much funnier than this one.
“You do not tell Dr. Cecil Montgomery to go to hell.”
No one did.
I was raised to have an almost godlike deference to my legendary father—I didn’t know anyone who didn’t. You did not argue with him, you did not disagree with him, and you certainly did not tell him to go to hell.
I went to the university my father told me to go to. I pursued the career he demanded. In fact, the only time, and I do mean the only time, that I ever dared disregard my dad’s wishes was when I went into emergency medicine instead of surgery. He only let it go because Derek was the family front-runner anyway, so I didn’t really matter.
That backfired.
Bri poked at her ice with her straw. “Your dad terrifies me. When he used to come to the ER, everyone would scatter like cockroaches. And then your mom would come in after him to do a spinal consult, all sweetness and light, mopping up the tears of the nurses. Why’s there always a nice one and a mean one?”
“Because there are two types of people in the world, difficult ones and easy ones, and they marry each other.”
“Ha.”
She paused for a moment and eyed me. “Okay. So tell me about the hickey. Telling everyone you burned yourself with a curling iron—are we in tenth grade?”