Maya had said, feeling warm and happy, shot straight through with sweetness.
It made her feel sick now.
She hadn’t seen it coming. She’d been thinking about how she and Ethan had started together at the same Seven Sisters firm in Toronto after their articling placements. They’d worked on cases together. They’d grown closer and closer. Eventually, all those late nights and weekends had led to more. A year after that, they’d moved into a condo in chic, trendy Yorkville together. When Ethan had proposed six months later, it had seemed like the next, perfect, logical step.
Maya’s life had always gone according to plan. As a Martin, Maya had been expected to excel from her earliest days in Toronto’s tony Lawrence Park neighborhood, through her prelaw studies at McGill in Montreal, straight on to law school at the University of Toronto, a plum articleship with one of her father’s impressive friends and into her current place as a senior associate at one of Canada’s best law firms.
Ethan fit right in. He was successful, ambitious and attractive. Their life together was filled with shared interests, from work to working out, the odd minibreak when schedules allowed and a very clear focus on how to build the perfect future together.
Maya and Ethan made sense. It was that simple.
“I know I can tell you this, though the timing is off,” Ethan had said that morning. He’d come to sit next to her on the sofa in her suite at the Four Seasons in Yorkville with its view out over the city. He’d taken her hands in his, his thumb brushing the cushion-cut halo diamond from Birks he’d placed there himself when he’d proposed at one of their favorite restaurants. “I’ve fallen in love, Maya.”
She still hadn’t gotten it. She’d been focused on the plan. The future they’d carefully plotted out together over dinners and on long runs. First they would both make partner at their top-tier law firm. Only when that was nailed down would they move to a tony suburb, like Rosedale or Lawrence Park, to start their own family and continue the cycle of Martin excellence. Martins were lawyers, doctors like Melinda, professors like their cousins or CEOs like their father. Their lives were duly glittering because they worked hard and excelled at everything they did.
So Maya had only sat there, smiling softly at the man she’d expected to marry, practice law with, make babies with and glitter with, because Martins didn’t suffer hideous public humiliations. Martins didn’t make mistakes.
“Neither one of us meant it to happen,” Ethan was saying in that engaging way of his that helped him win cases. “Both Lorraine and I feel sick at how this will hurt you, but we were powerless. People fall in love sometimes, even if it’s inconvenient.”
Maya had finally stopped smiling then, when he’d said her oldest friend’s name. “What? Lorraine?”
“In time,” Ethan had said in that plummy, confident voice that was half the reason Maya had been so enamored of him in the first place, “we think you’ll agree that this is actually for the best.”
What happened after that was a bit of a merciful blur.
There were guests waiting—family and friends from all over Canada and abroad—but Maya’s father had dealt with that in his severe way that brooked no argument or follow-up questions.
There was the dress that Maya and her mother and sister had picked out together, exactly the kind of fairy-tale gown Martin girls deserved to wear. Maya had tried on the winner while her mother had looked proud for once and Melinda had smiled, no doubt remembering her own triumphant wedding. Maya was carrying on the Martin family tradition of marrying well and living better, and the dress was a beautiful indulgence to mark the occasion.
She had secretly loved that dress and not because it “set the right tone,” according to her chilly mother. She had imagined herself wearing it, sweeping down the aisle and then dancing the night away at the reception, with all that white surrounding her like a gift.
Now she wanted to burn it.
The details were fuzzy, once it was clear that Ethan was deadly serious, that he couldn’t be talked out of it, that he was really, truly calling off his own wedding a few hours before the ceremony.
But what Maya really remembered were the things Ethan had said when he had stopped pretending to worry about Maya’s feelings. When he made it clear, at last, that he hadn’t worried about Maya’s feelings in a long while—or, possibly, ever.
“Come on, Maya,” he had thrown at her, his lip curling into a sneer that made him look like a complete stranger. The kind of stranger who might sleep with his fiancée’s best friend and call off his own wedding. “You like your sex boring and vanilla, and that’s fine. That’s your right. But ultimately, I’m not willing to shackle myself to someone who can’t satisfy my needs.”
“Your needs?” Maya had been on her feet by then. They’d been going around and around for hours, though the damage had already been done. She’d thrown his ring at his head like the cliché she’d never dreamed she’d become. Papa had made the announcement in the chapel, filled already with their friends, their families and, most embarrassingly, their business associates. “What does that mean, Ethan? Lorraine pretends to like anal? She indulges your heretofore-unknown foot fetish? Or, let me guess, she dresses up like a little girl and calls you daddy. Is that what you like? Because you told me you liked a grown woman, not an overgrown child whose life is and always will be a disaster of her own making.”
“I understand your childish need to swipe at me,” Ethan had said with great dignity, as if he had the moral high ground. “I deserve it, I suppose. But I won’t allow you to talk about Lorraine like that.”
That hadn’t helped.
But it wasn’t until Ethan had slunk out, under direct physical threat from Maya’s normally icy-cold mother, that the Lorraine part really sank in.
Lorraine had been Maya’s roommate at McGill. Maya had tended to her through all the emotional upheavals Lorraine had suffered over the years, from the jobs she’d lost to the relationships she’d sabotaged. Maya had given Lorraine a place to sleep when she’d been evicted, had given her money when she was short and had gotten in more fights with Ethan than she could count over what he’d called her “obsession with that albatross around your neck.” Maya had even made Lorraine her maid of honor over her sister, because she’d thought her fragile, thin-skinned friend would have had a breakdown otherwise.
“I don’t want her to feel left out,” Maya had told Melinda, who was older than Maya by four years and had witnessed many Lorraine fits and breakdowns over the years. “You know how destructive she can be.”
The truth was, even Maya hadn’t known Lorraine was this destructive.
What made it worse was that Melinda had understood, even though Maya had been her maid of honor when Melinda had married Edward years ago. And now Maya was left to feel as horrified about that decision as every other one she had ever made concerning Lorraine.
She honestly didn’t know which part of the equation made her feel more ill. Ethan. Lorraine. Or her own unforgivable blindness.
“I think the worst thing you can do right now is run off by yourself somewhere,” her mother had said much later that terrible day, when Maya seized on the Italy thing like the lifeline it was. Mother had reverted to her usual crisp, icy demeanor, as if nothing untoward had happened—or nothing she couldn’t arrange to her satisfaction, eventually. “What you need to do is
