You marry Nick in Vegas and spend three days having desperate sex in your honeymoon suite, the one the casino manager upgraded you to after he found out you'd just been married and that your new husband ships out to Afghanistan in six days.
Before you know it, you're standing in the Toronto airport, nervously twirling the strange ring on your finger as you watch him shoulder his bag and disappear into a mess of camouflaged men and women, all saying goodbye to their loved ones. It hits you then, as he walks off without looking back, what you've done.
Two months later, you faint in the middle of your police physical, the one that will determine if you're physically capable of entering the police academy, of joining the police force. The medic takes your temperature and your pulse and tells you to come back with next week to try again. Advises you to get plenty of rest and make sure you're getting enough protein as you try to shave off the pounds you've picked up in a recent bout of stress-eating.
When you start throwing up on the weekend, you can no longer ignore what your body's been trying to tell you. You're pregnant. Nine days of married sex and you'd managed to get yourself knocked up.
It figures.
You've never been particularly lucky.
You don't tell Nick, not even when he manages to call on your birthday. Instead you talk to him for fifteen fuzzy minutes over the crackling connection, promise to send him a list of things you'll forget as soon as you hang up the phone, and collapse to the floor the moment you hear the silence of the dead line.
You're twenty-three, pregnant, and alone.
Your mother figures it out somehow. Even though she doesn't say anything, you know Elaine knows. Maybe it's the way you stopped drinking at your weekly lunches, or the way your face has started to fill out just the slightest.
But somehow she knows, and during one terrible moment at lunch she takes your hand in hers and tells you that everything will be okay.
You can't help it, you throw yourself into your mother's body and cry. For what, you don't know. Maybe you cry for Nick, maybe you cry for the baby growing inside of you.
Maybe you just cry for you.
It doesn't matter.
What matters is that in that moment, you know what you have to do.
You terminate the pregnancy.
You let Elaine come back into the room with you, let her hold your hand.
You say nothing to Nick.
You know you never will.
And the thing is, as you slip into your childhood bed later that night, as you let your mother check your head for fever, being you soup and painkillers, you finally let yourself admit that your marriage has an expiration date.
That all you're doing is waiting for the end.
The abortion wasn't the first nail in the coffin.
Just the latest one.
You get into the Academy, and you graduate second in your class. At the ceremony your parents and brother cheer and cheer, smiles so wide you can't figure out how their faces haven't cracked.
Nick arranged for flowers to be delivered, and they sit on the counter for three days before they begin to wilt.
You can't help but read that as a sign.
Nick volunteers for another tour, and gets a week's leave return. You meet up with him in Spain and try to remember what he looked like before the tan and the sand-rough skin and hard, hard muscles. And though your bodies still fit together like before, there's too much left unsaid and acknowledged between you, and you don't find the joy of feeling his body move above yours, in yours, that you used to.
When you part, it's with an awkward hug and promises to call each other more often during this deployment.
You both know it's a lie.
At the precinct you get your tie cut and go out to celebrate your new-found freedom at work with your fellow ex-rookies.
Life keeps moving on.
And suddenly you have a a new friend, a pathology intern with a quick, crooked grin and a wicked swing. Someone who makes you forget that you go home to an empty apartment, that you're waiting for the boy you once loved to come home so you can tell him you don't think you love him anymore.
She gets you, this Holly. She sees you, the person you are beneath everything else, the layers you wear for everyone else in your life.
She sees you, and in her eyes you feel naked.
You feel free.
Maybe you should have seen it coming, but you didn't.
You didn't.
Not until the morning you wake up with your head on her chest and her hair in your mouth and your clothes tangled together on the floor next to the bed.
And neither of you hungover enough to blame it on the alcohol you'd drank the night before.
The phone rings while the two of you are clutching the sheets to cover yourselves and struggling to decide whether you should be embarrassed or ashamed, and she smiles and reaches for your phone to hand it to you.
When you hear Nick's commanding officer tell you there's been an incident, that your husband is on a flight to Germany and the base medics are doing the best they can to make sure he gets there alive, it feels like the perfect kind of punishment.
By the time you get back to Toronto, your husband on crutches behind you, she's gone. Her internship is over and she's moved on to the next stage of her training.
And it's for the best. Because you need to be here for Nick and you can't tell him that you don't love him anymore right now. Not while the doctors are still trying to determine whether he'll ever walk on his own again.
Because this is your life, the one you signed up for when you inked your name onto the marriage license.
She didn't sign up for anything.
Slowly, Nick recovers, and he tells you his plans for the future. The academy, the force, the uniform.
And he tells you he knows it's over. That your marriage was a mistake made in a moment of desperation, a decision made in reaction to the fear of losing each other. That you've always been better friends than romantic partners.
It feels good to nod and agree. To finally acknowledge what you've known, what you've both known, since almost the very beginning.
You start the divorce proceedings, and he moves into the second bedroom, and suddenly he's your roommate and your best friend again, exactly how it started the first time, and everything seems to be going right again.
After the paperwork comes through, right after he starts as a rookie in your division, you tell him about the girl. The one you could smell on you all through that terrifying flight to Germany. You tell him about Holly and how amazing she was, how she made you feel right in your own skin for the first time ever.
You don't know what you expect, but it's not a clap on the back and an easy smile. You'd forgotten how much he's only ever wanted the best for you, your ex-husband, how he's only ever wanted you to be happy.
And Nick gets his tie cut, and the two of you find your own apartments, and then one day the two of you are paired up at a body dump in the middle of the woods when a woman in an ugly green coat tries to slip past you towards the remains.
"Holly," you say, seeing that familiar grin, and Nick looks over at the two of you, recognizing the name immediately.
Out of the corner of your eye, you see him give you a thumbs up and that stupid, approving smile guys get when they check out each other's women. "Way to go," he mouths, and you flip him off, your stupid, idiotic ex-husband, your best friend.
"Holly," you take a deep breath and repeat, "you free after this?"