Chapter 1

My husband Marcus Ashford has severe social anxiety.

In three years of marriage, he refused to meet a single one of my friends or family.

Even our wedding was just the two of us, because he said a crowd would trigger a panic attack.

Because it hurt me to see him like that, I put up with my parents' disappointment and my friends' confusion, made every excuse for him, and guarded his fragile little world with both hands.

That changed tonight, when I stumbled onto the social media page of his first love, newly returned from overseas.

In the photos, Marcus moved through the room with Chloe, working the toasts with total ease, laughing wide and unguarded.

I opened the next live photo, and a snatch of conversation came out of it.

"Marcus, isn't today your father-in-law's birthday too? You're not going to swing by?"

Marcus answered as though it were nothing, "Going would just be pointless socializing. A waste of time. I'd rather stay here with Chloe."

I went through those few photos over and over, more times than I could count, until my eyes were dry and stinging, and then I shut off the screen without a word.

Then I called a lawyer and had the divorce papers drawn up.

So his world was full of voices and noise after all. It simply refused to open for me, and for me alone.

Fine. If the party wasn't mine, I wasn't going to keep forcing my way in.

Chapter 1

"Vivi, sweetheart, is Marcus not coming today either?"

My father sighed, and the gray at his temples looked painfully bright under the restaurant lights.

I followed his eyes to the empty seat we had set aside at the round table, and my throat tightened.

Three full years of marriage, and Marcus, his son-in-law, had met my parents only through a phone screen.

Every holiday there was a place setting for him at their table, and he never once showed up.

Worse still, last year on my birthday I hadn't told him in advance that my parents were coming.

He pushed open the door of the private room, and the second he saw them his face went cold. He turned around and walked out without a shred of hesitation.

He left my parents standing there, not knowing what to do with their hands.

That night I chased him through street after street in heels, coaxing him in the smallest voice I had.

Under the dim streetlight, Marcus looked at me with nothing but irritation.

"Vivian, you know I can't handle social situations. Why do you insist on forcing me into an environment that suffocates me? Have you ever once thought about how I feel?"

Back then my head was full of nothing but guilt.

But now there were the photos: Marcus sipping tea with Chloe's mother, playing chess in the garden with Chloe's father.

The man who could barely bring himself to speak to my own parents was effortlessly charming with hers.

And all that was left inside me was a long, dead flatness of disappointment.

"Vivi?"

My mother leaned in, worried, and patted the back of my hand.

"What are you staring at? If Marcus isn't coming, he isn't coming. His situation is special, we understand..."

"Dad. Mom."

I came back to myself and swallowed down the copper taste in my throat.

Watching the two of them tiptoe around making excuses for him, I suddenly found the woman I used to be absolutely ridiculous.

"You don't need to save him a seat anymore."

The rest of the meal tasted like sawdust.

After I settled the check, I walked out of the restaurant with an arm through each of my parents' arms.

We had just reached the curb when a burst of laughter broke out behind us.

"Marcus, could you be any more obvious? People come over to toast her and you won't let Chloe touch a single glass, you drink every one for her!"

"Seriously. After all these years, we're still stuck watching you two make the rest of us feel single!"

I looked up without thinking. Marcus and a whole group were coming out of the revolving door not far away.

Marcus let the corner of his mouth curve and let them tease him.

"Oh? Isn't that Marcus?"

My mother followed my eyes, and her face lit up. She hurried toward him.

"Marcus, you came! That girl of mine, honestly, you should have told us you were coming, her father was just talking about you."

The smile on Marcus's face went out instantly.

His gaze went past my mother and landed on me, and his brows drew together fast.

"Vivian, I have told you before. I reject all unnecessary socializing. It makes me extremely uncomfortable."

"So what exactly is this, bringing your parents here to corner me?"

I watched the color drain a little from my mother's face.

The men and women who had been laughing a second ago were now watching the scene with open interest.

He wasn't rejecting socializing.

He was only rejecting mine.

The night wind slid cold down my collar, and a fine, prickling ache spread through every inch of me.

Before I could open my mouth, my father was already waving his hands in a panic.

"No, no, Marcus, don't misunderstand Vivi!"

"We didn't know you'd be here. It's my birthday, that's all, and Vivi took the two of us out to dinner. We really weren't trying to corner you."

Chloe, on his arm, gave him a playful little smack.

"Marc, that's no way to talk to your elders."

She turned to me with a sweet smile. "You must be his wife. I'm so sorry, Marc missed your father's birthday because he was throwing me a welcome dinner. You don't mind, do you?"

"We're heading out to a karaoke place next. Would you like to come along and join the fun?"

Chapter 2

"She won't be coming."

"Different circles. She wouldn't have any fun with us."

Marcus dropped the words like they cost him nothing and reached over to pull the wrap higher on Chloe's shoulders.

The group behind him let out a few muffled snickers.

"Right, dragging some stranger along would kill the mood."

"Marcus is as protective as ever. God forbid Chloe feel out of place."

They tossed the lines back and forth, and every one of them spelled out the same cruel truth.

In Marcus's world, I was the outsider. Chloe was the rightful leading lady, the one everyone gathered around.

In college, Marcus and Chloe had been the golden couple, and nobody disputed it.

Their families matched. Their faces matched.

It lasted until the year they graduated, when Chloe left the country without a word to anyone.

After that Marcus, who had always been so proud, fell apart completely and spent his days soaking himself in alcohol.

I was the one who quietly stayed beside him and took care of him down to the smallest thing.

That went on until alcohol poisoning put him in the hospital.

When he woke up, he stared at my swollen red eyes and said, out of nowhere, "Vivian, do you want to marry me?"

No flowers. No ring. He had never even said he liked me.

And that was how we blundered into signing the license.

I had thought that because I walked him through his darkest years, I had to mean something different to him.

But now there was the way he looked at Chloe: the fixed, hungry focus of a man who has just gotten back what he lost.

And I finally understood—these three years had been nothing but a compromise he settled for while he waited.

A car horn at the curb pulled me back.

"Well, since everything's been said, we'll be going."

Marcus turned and got into the black sedan beside him. He didn't even give my parents a token goodbye.

The streetlight stretched the shadows of the three of us long and crooked across the pavement.

My mother's rough fingers twisted together anxiously.

"Vivi... it's my fault for opening my big mouth. Did we make trouble for you again?"

She pressed the gift box in her hands into mine.

"You said last time that Marcus has been getting headaches. I knitted this scarf for him myself. Portland winters are damp and cold, and he works so hard. If his neck gets chilled, the headaches come."

"Go home and explain it to him properly. Married life is married life. Don't fall out over two old people like us."

Something thick and sour rose in my nose, and my eyes burned before I could stop them.

I stepped forward and gripped their cold hands tight. "It's all right, Dad, Mom. I'm the one who was a fool."

I looked toward the direction the car had disappeared.

"He's never going to respect you. So I don't want him either."

Marcus came home at three in the morning.

He caught sight of me still awake on the couch and stopped halfway through changing his shoes.

"Why aren't you asleep? Still sulking about tonight?"

He set a solid wood gift box on the coffee table in front of me.

"I was too harsh tonight. You know how I am with crowds."

"Your father likes tea, doesn't he? Give him this tin tomorrow. Call it a late birthday present from me."

I stared at the gold lettering stamped across the lid. Cloudmere. My eyes stung.

Cloudmere was a hundred-year-old tea house. It never sold loose leaf at all.

The only way to get a tin of their reserve oolong was as a free tasting sample with the season's most expensive signature pressed cake.

And I had just seen that exact signature cake in Chloe's photos.

How this tin had come into his hands didn't need spelling out.

I didn't even have the strength left to demand an answer. I just pulled out the document pinned under the box.

"Marcus, since Chloe is back, then we..."

He cut me off before I finished, impatient.

"Vivian, if you're going to keep picking at what happened at the restaurant, this stops being interesting."

Without warning, lightning tore across the sky outside.

Marcus turned his head toward the floor-length window before he could stop himself.

After a short silence, something seemed to come back to him, and his face changed in an instant.

Chapter 3

The next second he snatched up the coat he had just put down and strode toward the entryway.

"Chloe has been scared of thunder since she was little. She just got back, she's living alone, she'll be terrified. I'm going to check on her."

My face went white, and it took me a long moment to force out a sentence. "Could you not go?"

He didn't slow down. "Whatever it is, it can wait until I'm back."

Almost the instant he left, thunder cracked open the sky outside.

My whole body jerked. Without thinking I wrapped my arms around myself and curled deep into the corner of the couch.

Looking at the empty living room, I couldn't help a bitter little laugh.

Three years.

Marcus still couldn't remember that I was afraid of thunder too.

I looked down at the divorce agreement in my hands and signed my name at the bottom.

The rain fell all night and still hadn't stopped by daylight.

I had drifted into a half sleep when a phone call jolted me awake.

"Vivi... your father spiked a fever in the middle of the night, he's coughing so hard he can't breathe, I think his old lung condition is flaring up again." My mother's voice was thick with tears, and behind it was the noise of an emergency room.

"They say the beds are full and there's no way to get an appointment with a good specialist. What are we going to do..."

I calmed her down with one hand while I scrambled into my clothes with the other and ran out the door.

My father's lung condition was an old one, and Portland weather, this endless cold gray rain, was the surest thing to set it off.

Then it hit me. Marcus had mentioned once that he knew a world-renowned foreign specialist in difficult lung cases.

And that specialist happened to be in Portland right now for a medical exchange.

I put last night's ugly ending aside, turned around, and hurried to Marcus's company.

In three years of marriage I had barely ever gone to his office.

He had said the building was full of eyes and he wasn't comfortable having people dig into his private life.

I found my way to his floor from memory, and as I came around the corner I heard employees gossiping in the break room.

"Do you guys know who Mr. Ashford had lunch with today? His first love!"

"No wonder he skipped a whole meeting and flew out of here to pick her up. Looks like those two getting back together is only a matter of time."

"He never says a word to anybody that isn't about work, and just now he actually asked me which bubble tea was good! Guess who he was buying it for."

The words went into me like needles, fine and everywhere at once.

I took a deep breath and pushed open his office door.

Marcus looked up at the sound, and his brows knitted.

"What are you doing here?"

"Didn't I tell you not to come to the office? If people see you, they'll start asking questions, and I don't want to explain our relationship to anyone."

I looked into his cold eyes, and my heart felt like an invisible hand had closed hard around it.

He didn't mind anyone knowing what he was to Chloe, but he wouldn't waste breath explaining that I existed.

I dropped my eyes and swallowed the bitterness rising in my throat.

"If I had any other option, I wouldn't be bothering you."

"My father's lung condition flared up. It's bad. Can you get in touch with Professor Reid for me? I know the two of you know each other..."

"No." He refused flatly.

"Going to him means I'd have to set up the meeting myself, pay a visit, sit through dinner. One thing leads to another, and it's all exactly the kind of socializing I hate most."

Marcus pinched the bridge of his nose with those long fingers, as though just naming those things had worn him out.

"You know perfectly well I can't stand that fake, smiling networking, and I don't like owing favors over other people's business."

My heart wrenched, and the bitterness in it kept sinking with nowhere to land.

Even after everything tangled between us, my father's illness was, in Marcus's eyes, nothing but "other people's business," the kind he stayed well clear of.

I couldn't stop myself from raising my voice. "But my father is..."

Marcus cut in. "Hospitals have procedures. Stop looking for shortcuts."

He glanced at his watch, his tone going through the motions.

"I have another meeting. Go home."

Chapter 4

By the time I came out of Marcus's office, the rain was heavier.

At least it wasn't completely hopeless.

Professor Reid released two appointment slots a day.

I paid a small fortune, and I finally got one for the day before he was scheduled to leave.

But right as we were about to walk into the exam room, the nurse at the desk stopped me, her face full of apology.

"I'm so sorry. Professor Reid was just called into an emergency consult on the eighth floor, the VIP wing. All the remaining appointments have to be refunded."

The words came down on me like a bucket of ice water.

"My father is coughing so hard he can't breathe, a flare-up like this can't wait! Can't you make an exception, even just one look..."

My voice shook with panic.

The nurse sighed helplessly.

"There's really nothing I can do. Upstairs pulled him away directly. Go up to the eighth floor and beg. Maybe he can still squeeze you in."

I tore up to the eighth floor like a madwoman, only to find two familiar figures outside the VIP room.

Chloe had her arm tucked cozily through Marcus's.

"Marc, this is so much trouble for you. My dad just feels a little tight in the chest with the season changing, he coughed a couple of times, that's all. You're so busy, and you still had to pull strings to get Professor Reid here..."

Marcus ruffled her hair, and his voice held a patience and warmth I had never once heard.

"Your father's health comes first. We're not taking any chances with it."

"I spoke to Reid personally. I told him to give your father a full workup."

My nails dug deep into my palms, yet I couldn't feel a thing.

I cut straight through their tender little moment.

"Marcus, do you have any idea how long I waited for that appointment? Do you have any idea that my father is downstairs coughing up blood!"

The hallway went quiet for a beat at my sudden arrival.

Chloe shrank back behind Marcus. "Please don't blame Marc. I'm the one who begged him for help."

"I just got back, I don't know anybody here, and the second my father felt unwell I panicked and there was nobody to call but Marc... I didn't know your father was sick too."

Her eyes reddened as she caught at Marcus's sleeve.

"Why don't you let Professor Reid see her father first? My dad will be fine."

"This has nothing to do with you." Marcus reached back and closed his hand around Chloe's wrist to soothe her, and his eyes came at me cold.

"Vivian, do you have no sense of decency at all? Barging onto a patient's floor and shouting!"

"Her father is an older man. I can't just stand there and watch him suffer and do nothing."

The hand I raised to point at Chloe wouldn't stop shaking.

"Her father's illness counts and my father's doesn't?"

Marcus paused.

"Your father's lungs are a chronic problem he's had for years. Book him into general internal medicine, get him something for the wheezing. What's the problem? Why do you have to pick this exact moment to compete with Chloe?"

Every word cut a strip off me.

Looking at how entirely reasonable Marcus thought he was being, I suddenly laughed, low and quiet.

Laughed until my tears hit the cold tile.

Chloe's father coughed inside the room, and Marcus waved me off in annoyance.

"That's enough. Don't stand here disturbing his rest. If general internal medicine isn't good enough for you, I'll find you another specialist in the country later, all right?"

I pulled the ring off my finger, the one I had worn for three years.

I raised my arm and threw it at him hard.

"Marcus, let's get divorced."