"I was going to ask." My voice cracks on the last word, just slightly. "I was going to ask if you and your wife would come. It's small. Just the ceremony and a dinner afterward. St. Elias, ten days from now, it’s a Saturday. Two o'clock."
Dr. Mehta picks up her pen. She writes the date on a Post-it note and sticks it to the corner of her monitor.
"We'll be there," she says with a smile.
“I haven’t asked Denise yet, but I’d like her there too if she can be. After everything with Jason, I don’t have any of my old friends. He made it so it was easier to drift apart from them than to deal with his moods…”
Dr Mehta nods, but doesn’t say anything. What is there to say?
I stand. I hold the envelope against my chest.
"Dr. Mehta."
She looks up.
"You saved my life," I say. "You know that, right? Before Nick. Before any of this. You saw what was happening and you got me out. You gave me a job and a reason to get up in the morning. Everything that's happened since then, all of it, starts with you."
She takes off her reading glasses and folds them. She sets them on the desk with the care of a woman who is buying herself a moment.
"It starts with you, Sadie," she says. "I opened a door. You walked through it. Don't confuse the two."
I nod because I can't speak. I leave her office and walk back down the hall to the break room, where Priya is pretending to organize the supply cabinet and failing to hide the fact that she's been crying.
"She already had the recommendation letter written," I say.
Priya wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. "Of course she did. She's Dr. Mehta. She probably had your wedding present picked out too."
I hug her. She hugs me back. We stand in the break room of the clinic that gave me my life back, holding each other, and the coffee pot hisses on the counter and somewhere in the waiting room the toddler laughs, and the world is ordinary and warm and continuing.
“Could you pass this on to Denise for me, please?” I hand her the invite. “And tell her I’m sorry I didn’t get to see her, today.”
Priya nods.
I text Nick.Done. Coming home. One-twenty-two.
His reply comes in four seconds.Good.
One word. The only word that matters.
Dmitri is waiting at the curb. He opens the door for me and I get in, holding the recommendation letter in my lap. I look at the ring and I think about the next ten days.
A dress. A church. A priest who has known Nick since he was a baby. Dmitri in a suit, probably armed. Dr. Mehta and her wife, Priya and Denise standing for me. Irina, who smiled at the ring without a word. Mikhail, with a medical kit somewhere nearby because that's how my life works now and I've made my peace with it.
My parents won't be there. That's the thing I haven't let myself sit with yet, the absence that waits at the center of every good thing like a stone at the bottom of a clear pool. They won't see the dress. My mom won't fix my hair. My father won’t walk me down the aisle.
They would have liked Nick.
I press my hand against the window. The city slides past. The ring is warm on my finger.
Ten days.
I close my eyes and let Dmitri drive me home.
Nick
The study smells like lemon oil and new wood.
The boards are in. Pasha's crew pulled the old ones as soon as Sadie had been found, and worked through the night sanding and staining the replacements. By the time the varnish dried, you couldn't tell where the blood had been. The desk is in the same position. The lamp is in the same position. The Makarov is in the top right drawer where it belongs.
