Furious by Jeffrey Higgins (top 10 novels to read TXT) 📕

mind cleared, and I knew what I had to do. I would return to Boston Pediatric Surgical Center and finish my fellowship. I would move back into my home in Boston and eventually my personal life—my love life—would right itself. I would continue to see the hospital psychiatrist and find a way to cope with my grief.

Brad’s violence would only get worse the more comfortable he became with me. It was only a matter of time before he hit me. I had married Brad because of our baby and now our baby was gone. It was cliché to get divorced after losing a child, like so many couples unable to recover from the trauma, but my reasons for divorce were not about Emma. The marriage had been for Emma.

The divorce was for me.

I climbed below, tiptoed through the salon, and peeked into the stateroom. Brad lay sprawled on the bed with the sheets wrapped around him. He glistened with sweat, and his hair had matted into clumps. He looked pale, with dark circles under his eyes, and he snored like a grizzly bear. I backed away and closed the door behind me.

I needed to talk to someone, and my thoughts turned to Jessica. I reached for the satellite phone and dialed. The connection hissed and clicked.

Jessica answered, and I heard the clamor of the emergency room—monitors beeping, the murmur of voices, someone screaming. It sounded like home.

“Dagny?”

“Can you talk?”

“I always have time for you. Give me a second to walk into the hallway.”

“Sure.”

The ambient noise disappeared. “That’s better. You okay, sweetie?”

“I’m good. I mean really good.”

“Oh?” Jessica asked, her voice rising. “Let’s hear the straight shit.”

“I came to a decision, and I need you to tell me if I’m nuts.”

“I’m listening,” she said, hungry for gossip.

“I’m going to ask Brad for a divorce.”

Static popped and crackled over the line.

“Jessica? Are you there? Did you hear me?”

“Oh, I’m here. I’ve been waiting for you to dump that asshole since the first day I met him.”

“I’m not making a mistake?”

“Have I ever lied to you?” Jessica asked.

“Probably.”

“I mean about important stuff,” she said.

“No, you’re always brutally honest.”

“Believe me when I tell you, divorcing Brad will be the best thing you’ve ever done.”

“You don’t think I’m doing it, because of what Brad and I went through? It’s not PTSD, is it?”

“Brad’s a narcissistic prick who only cares how good you look on his arm. You’re not dumping him because you experienced a tragedy. You only married him because you were pregnant.”

I had never told Jessica that. I had always praised Brad in front of her. Anything else would have been disloyal. “It was that obvious?”

“Everyone knew why you married him. He’s a goddamned sexy piece of ass, but he does not deserve you. I mean, you’re gorgeous too, but he can’t possibly challenge you intellectually.”

“Marrying him seemed like the right thing to do. It—”

“Oops, they need me. Someone’s coding. I have to go. You’re doing the right thing.”

“Thanks, I needed the reality check,” I said, but she had already disconnected.

I tiptoed to the stateroom and listened to Brad’s snoring, thick and spasmodic. I would wait. I climbed back onto the deck.

Divorcing Brad was the right call. We had never melded, and I had never become part of his family. Brad and I had visited his parents at their waterfront home in Rockport, on Massachusetts’s North Shore. I had sipped tea and shifted my weight on a stiff Victorian chair in their living room, while I stared through their floor-to-ceiling windows at the Atlantic Ocean. They had set the thermostat to seventy degrees, but it had seemed much cooler. I could still picture the expressions on their faces.

“I think you’re making a mistake,” Mrs. Coolidge said. “You barely know each other.”

“Dagny’s perfect for me,” Brad said. “I love her.”

“She’s not our people, no offense dear, but we come from different worlds,” Mrs. Coolidge said.

There it was—the elitism. I wanted to remind her my family had arrived in Boston first. Instead, I set my tea on the table and tried to make nice.

“Mr. and Mrs. Coolidge, you make a valid point. I agree Brad and I have moved fast, but we’re thinking about the baby.”

Mrs. Coolidge cast a frosty stare. “There are procedures to remove that problem.”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I turned to Brad. “I’m done here. Take me home.”

That was the last time I had seen his parents. They did not attend our wedding.

Brad had been raised Protestant, and I had grown up Catholic, but neither of us were religious, and I had agreed to a civil ceremony. Brad paid fifty dollars for a marriage license and one month later, we arrived at Room 601 in Boston City Hall—an antiseptic office in a concrete monstrosity. My wedding day.

“Are you sure this is okay with you?” Brad asked. “We can reserve the club and do it next month. I have a hundred people who would come and none of them would care you’re pregnant.”

Brad had dozens of acquaintances, people he called friends, but he was not close to any of them. The thought of rallying a group of virtual strangers around us to celebrate something so intimate, seemed wrong.

“I don’t have any family left and only one close friend. If your parents and family won’t attend, it seems weird to have a big wedding. All I need is you.” I put on a brave face.

At three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, Brad and I waited for our turn to be married. I wore a stylish white dress, not a wedding gown, because my stomach bulged and the thought of wearing a gown in my state of pregnancy seemed desperate, sad. Our no-nonsense wedding was nothing like I had imagined as a child. The dress, the ceremony—the man. It all felt wrong, joyless. What would my father have thought about a ceremony like this? What would he have thought about Brad? No one could equal the man my father had been. I