Part Two: Two Sisters
My name is Leah Moran. I’m thirty years old.
I’m a pediatrician at a children’s hospital in Pittsburgh. I’ve been married to Mike for three years. I’m seven months pregnant with our first baby. A girl.
My sister, Samantha, is two years older than me.
We grew up in a small brick house in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Our dad drove a delivery truck for a bakery. Our mom, Gail, worked as a receptionist at a dentist’s office.
Samantha was the pretty one.
That’s what everybody said. Teachers. Neighbors. Aunts at Thanksgiving. Samantha’s the pretty one. Leah’s the smart one.
Samantha was blonde, like Mom. Blue-eyed. Tall. She was homecoming queen. Prom queen. Captain of the cheerleading squad.
I had brown hair and glasses and braces until I was sixteen. I was on the debate team and the science olympiad team. I read books at lunch.
Mom loved us both. I believe that.
But Mom loved Samantha the way you love a mirror.
Mom had been the pretty one too, when she was young. She’d been Miss Lehigh Valley in 1982. She married my father at twenty because he told her she was the most beautiful girl in Pennsylvania.
Then she spent the next thirty years wondering if she could have done better.
Samantha was the daughter Mom understood.
I was the daughter Mom didn’t know what to do with.
Part Three: Samantha
Samantha always wanted what I had.
Not things, exactly. She had more things than me. More clothes, more friends, more boyfriends.
She wanted attention.
When I won the science fair in seventh grade, she fainted at the awards ceremony. Right in the middle of the gym. She was fine. The nurse said it was low blood sugar.
Everybody forgot about my science project.
When I got into Penn State with a full scholarship, she announced at the same dinner that she was engaged to a guy she’d been dating for three weeks.
The engagement lasted a month.
Everybody forgot about my scholarship.
When I was nineteen, I brought home my first serious boyfriend. A sweet, nerdy chemistry major named Alex.
By the end of the weekend, Alex was laughing at all of Samantha’s jokes.
He broke up with me two weeks later. He said he’d realized he wanted someone more fun.
I told Mom about it.
“Oh, honey,” Mom said. “Samantha’s just friendly. She doesn’t mean anything by it.”
That’s what Mom always said.
Samantha doesn’t mean anything by it.
Part Four: Spencer
I met Spencer Hale my first year of medical school.
At the University of Pittsburgh. He was a second-year law student. We met at a coffee shop near the medical campus, both of us studying at two in the morning, both of us out of cream.
He was charming. Funny. Handsome in a careless, rumpled way. He made me laugh at a time when I didn’t laugh very much.
We were together four years.
He was there for all of it. My anatomy exams. My first cadaver. My first time delivering a baby, at three in the morning, during my OB rotation. My Step 1 boards.
He brought me coffee during finals. He held me when I cried after my first patient died. A four-year-old boy with leukemia. I was twenty-four.
He proposed in my fourth year.
We were poor. Both of us. Drowning in student loans. Spencer was clerking for a judge for thirty-eight thousand a year. I was living on loans and ramen noodles.
He couldn’t afford a ring.
He told me so. Embarrassed. At our tiny kitchen table in our tiny apartment in Oakland.
“I want to marry you,” he said. “But I can’t buy you a ring. Not for a couple of years.”
I didn’t hesitate.
I went to my jewelry box. I took out a small velvet case.
Inside was Grandma Rose’s ring.
“Use this,” I said.
Spencer looked at it.
“Leah,” he said. “That’s your grandmother’s.”
“I know,” I said. “She’d want it on my finger. She wouldn’t care who put it there.”
He got down on one knee in our kitchen. He held out my grandmother’s ring.
“Leah Moran,” he said. “Will you marry me?”
I said yes.
Part Five: Finals
We set the date. June 17. A little church in Bethlehem. The same church where Grandma Rose and Grandpa Walt were married in 1956.
I asked Samantha to be my maid of honor.
I don’t know why. Habit, I suppose. She was my sister. That’s what you do.
She said yes. She hugged me. She cried.
I believed her.
My fourth-year medical school finals were in April.
Two weeks of exams. Sixteen hours a day of studying. I barely slept. I barely ate. I lived on coffee and granola bars.
Spencer was wonderful. He made me dinner. He quizzed me on drug interactions. He rubbed my shoulders.
Samantha came to visit that month.
She drove up from Philadelphia, where she lived. She said she wanted to help with the wedding planning. She stayed at our apartment for a week.
I was studying the whole time. In the library. At the hospital. I’d come home at midnight and go straight to bed.
Samantha and Spencer went to dinner together. Twice. To help with “wedding stuff,” she said.
I didn’t think anything of it.
On the last day of finals, I came home at nine o’clock at night.
I’d just finished my last exam. Internal medicine. I was so tired I could barely stand. I’d bought a bottle of cheap champagne on the way home.
Spencer was sitting at the kitchen table.
He wasn’t smiling.
“Leah,” he said. “We need to talk.”
Part Six: Prettier and Richer
He didn’t look at me when he said it.
He looked at the table. At his hands. At the bottle of champagne I’d set down.
“I don’t want to marry you anymore,” he said.
I stood there.
“What?” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Spencer said. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I don’t think we’re right for each other.”
“A while?” I said. “Spencer, we picked the date four months ago. We booked the church. Grandma Rose’s church.”
“I know,” he said.
“Is there someone else?”
He didn’t answer.
He didn’t have to.
He was gone by midnight.
He packed two suitcases. He left his books. He left his coffee mug. He left a note on the refrigerator that said I’m sorry and nothing else.
Before he left, he held out his hand.
“The ring,” he said quietly.
I don’t know why I gave it to him.
I was in shock. I’d been awake for thirty hours. I’d just finished the hardest exam of my life.
I took Grandma Rose’s ring off my finger with shaking hands.
I put it in his palm.
He closed his fingers around it and walked out the door.
Part Seven: The Photo
I found out three weeks later.
From Facebook.
Samantha posted it. A photo. Her and Spencer at a restaurant in Philadelphia. Holding hands across the table. Smiling.
New beginnings! the caption said. With a heart emoji.
I called Mom.
“Did you know?” I said.
Mom was quiet for a long time.
“Samantha told me last week,” she said. “Honey, I’m so sorry. But you know how these things are. The heart wants what it wants.”
“She was my maid of honor, Mom,” I said.
“I know, sweetheart,” Mom said. “It’s very complicated.”
“It’s not complicated,” I said. “She stole my fiancé.”
“Leah,” Mom said. “Don’t say stole. People aren’t things. Spencer made his own choice.”
She paused.
“Samantha told me what she said to him,” Mom said. “She just told him he deserved somebody who’d give him more attention. You were always studying, honey. You were never home.”
I found out later what Samantha actually said to him.
From a mutual friend. At a party, a year later. A girl named Priya who’d gone to law school with Spencer.
“She told him he deserved someone prettier,” Priya said. “And richer. She told him your student loans would drag him down for twenty years. She told him your family had money on your mom’s side, and she’d inherit it, not you.”
There was no money on Mom’s side.
Prettier and richer.
Apparently, Spencer agreed.
Part Eight: The Wedding
They got married eight months later.
In Philadelphia. At a hotel ballroom. Two hundred guests.
I wasn’t invited.
But Samantha sent me a photo.
A text message. From a number I’d blocked, so she must have used someone else’s phone. No message. No apology. No explanation.
Just a picture.
Samantha in a white strapless gown. Spencer in a black tuxedo. Standing under an arch of white roses. Smiling.
Her left hand was resting on his chest.
And there, on her finger, was my engagement ring.
Grandma Rose’s ring.
The small round diamond. The thin band of yellow gold. The tiny engraved roses.
The ring my grandfather saved eleven months to buy. The ring my grandmother wore for fifty-eight years. The ring she left to me because you’re the one who asks me about it.
The ring I’d taken off with shaking hands and returned to Spencer the night he left me.
On my sister’s finger.
On her wedding day.
I cried until I couldn’t breathe.
I was on my surgery rotation at the time. I sat in the stairwell of UPMC Presbyterian hospital at two in the morning, between cases, with my phone in my hand and my scrubs soaked with tears.
A night-shift nurse found me there. An older woman named Doreen.
She didn’t ask what was wrong. She just sat down next to me on the concrete stairs and held my hand until I could breathe again.
I called Mom the next day.
“Samantha’s wearing Grandma Rose’s ring,” I said. “In her wedding pictures.”
Mom was quiet.
“Spencer gave it to her,” Mom said finally. “He said it was his to give. You’d given it back to him.”
“It was Grandma’s,” I said.
“Leah,” Mom said. “Please. Let it go. For the family.”
I didn’t speak to Samantha after that.
Or Spencer.
Not once. Not in five years.
Part Nine: Mike
But not long after that, I met Mike.
It was a year later. I was a first-year pediatrics resident at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Working eighty hours a week. Sleeping in the call room. Eating vending machine crackers for dinner.
He was a high school chemistry teacher.
He came into the emergency department at two in the morning with one of his students. A fifteen-year-old boy who’d been in a car accident on the way home from a robotics competition. The boy’s parents were out of town. Mike had driven to the scene and followed the ambulance to the hospital.
He sat in the waiting room for six hours. Until the boy’s parents could get there.
I was the resident on call.
I came out at five in the morning to update him. The boy had a broken arm and a concussion. He’d be fine.
Mike stood up when he saw me. He was wearing a rumpled Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt and jeans. His eyes were red. He’d been crying.
“Is he okay?” he asked.
“He’s okay,” I said.
He sat down hard in the plastic waiting room chair. He put his face in his hands.
“Thank God,” he said. “Thank God.”
Then he looked up at me.
“Thank you,” he said. “Dr.—”
“Moran,” I said. “Leah.”
“Thank you, Dr. Leah,” he said.
He came back the next day with a box of donuts for the nurses.
He came back the day after that to visit his student.
On the fourth day, he asked me to coffee.
Part Ten: Trust
I said no.
Twice.
I told him I was too busy. Which was true. I was a first-year resident. I didn’t have time for anything.
But the real reason was that I couldn’t trust anybody anymore. Not men. Not my sister. Not my own mother.
Mike didn’t push.
He just kept bringing donuts to the nurses’ station every Friday.
On the third Friday, Doreen, the night nurse who’d held my hand in the stairwell a year earlier, cornered me in the break room.
“Leah,” she said. “That man has brought donuts to my station three Fridays in a row. He doesn’t even have a student here anymore.”
“I know,” I said.
“He asks about you every time,” Doreen said. “Not Is Dr. Moran working. He asks, Is she sleeping enough? Is she eating?”
She looked at me.
“Go to coffee with him, honey,” she said. “Before I do.”
I went to coffee with him.
He taught me how to trust again.
Not by saying anything. By showing up.
Every time he said he’d call, he called. Every time he said he’d be somewhere, he was there. Every time I told him something, he remembered it.
When I worked thirty-hour shifts, he left soup on my doorstep. When I cried about a patient, he sat with me on my couch and didn’t try to fix it. When I told him about Samantha and Spencer and Grandma Rose’s ring, he listened for two hours without saying a word.
When I was done, he took my hand.
“I’m never going to make you give anything back,” he said.
We were married two years later.
In a small ceremony at a park in Pittsburgh, by the river. Thirty guests.
Mom came. She cried. She was happy for me, I think.
Samantha wasn’t invited.
Mike bought me a ring.
A simple one. A thin platinum band with a small sapphire. He saved for it for a year on his teacher’s salary.
It’s beautiful.
But every once in a while, I’d catch myself rubbing my ring finger with my thumb. Feeling for the tiny engraved roses that weren’t there anymore.