This Is 35

by Stacey Wiedower

  "I really wrestled with it. But I felt like it was petty of me to not invite her to my wedding after all the years we've known each other. We've been friends since we were in diapers." Erin paused, glancing at the doorway, and her stomach gave a nervous jolt. "I was maid of honor in her wedding, remember? And she asked me to be Rowan's godmother. I couldn't not invite her."

  "The heck you say." Sherri screwed up her lips and turned her back to the doorway where Hilary was still standing, a collection of designer bags at her feet. She was looking around for a bellman to take things off her hands.

  Erin suppressed a chuckle. The lodge was nice, but it was more of a condo rental than a full-service hotel. She'd arranged the entire stay, and the wedding, for that matter, through the show, garnering a media rate for the wedding party and crew—and her own unit for free—in exchange for coverage on her blog and exposure on YOLO. It was the way of the world these days.

  Erin angled her body away from the doorway, lest Hilary spot her and try to dump the whole lot of luggage on her. It wouldn't be the first time she'd added to Erin's baggage.

  "I wonder if she's bringing the kids?" Erin said in a low voice. In the five years she'd been married, Hilary had delivered two babies, a boy first and then a girl—both blond-haired, blue-eyed, and photogenic, as if they'd been custom ordered from a Restoration Hardware catalog. It was so Hilary.

  "I don't even see Mark," Sherri said.

  "Hmm," Erin said. "I'm sure she wouldn't let him get out of coming with her. He's always been her yes-man."

  Erin still couldn't believe Mark had forgiven Hilary the second time she'd cheated on him, just months before their wedding—with Erin's boyfriend at the time, no less. Even though she'd gone through with her part in Hilary's wedding, their closeness had evaporated since then, to the point that Erin rarely saw her anymore.

  Still, she'd sent Hilary the invitation knowing she'd come, despite the distance—if not to show support for their years of friendship, then because she knew it would get her on TV. Erin might have forgiven her old friend, but unlike in her younger years, she viewed Hilary with open eyes.

  "Whew, we're off the hook, for now."

  Erin turned. Hilary's blonde head was bobbing toward the reception desk at the far end of the lobby. She was tottering on high-heeled peep-toe booties and making a show of wrestling with her obscenely large Louis Vuitton suitcase.

  Erin rolled her eyes but started toward her. "I invited her," she said to Sherri. "I should at least go and say hi."

  She didn't get the chance, though, because in her peripheral vision Erin spotted Leo heading her way. She stopped mid-step, jutting her chin and standing a little straighter. Before he even got all the way to her, she spun toward him, leveled him with an even gaze, and said, "No."

  He put his hands out in a plaintive gesture. "Then what am I here for? I came all the way to California to shoot this thing."

  "You're enjoying this company-paid trip to California to film my rock climbing adventure and my wedding," Erin shot back. "Tonight's not the wedding. It's just the rehearsal. And Ben isn't here yet."

  Leo's eyes crinkled at the corners. He clearly enjoyed Erin's pique. "What's the story with that?" His casual tone raised her hackles even more.

  "You know the story," she said. "He had to take a later flight because of an emergency at work." Erin fought to keep the panic that was bubbling in her stomach out of her voice.

  "Yeah, but shouldn't his flight have landed by now?"

  Ha! Don't I wish? Erin resisted the urge to slide her phone out of her right hip pocket again. Ben's flight had been scheduled to depart DFW forty-five minutes ago. And yet he hadn't texted, hadn't called, and hadn't answered the voicemail or any of the five texts she'd sent trying to get an ETA. She just had to hope he was in the air right now, that he hadn't found a moment to text before he was ordered to turn off his phone. Maybe he ran late to the airport. Maybe he had a long security line. Maybe…

  "He should be en route right now," she said, cutting off her desperate mental list of excuses. "He'll be landing around eight."

  "Cuttin' it a little close." Leo's eyes were all but dancing now. "I'm a risk-taking man, but even I know better than to cross a bride on her wedding day."

  "It's not my wedding day yet," Erin said, mentally patting herself on the back for keeping her cool. "And he will be here. He lands at eight," she added, emphasizing the last word. "And whether he's here or not, I don't want footage for the show of my rehearsal or rehearsal dinner. That's private. It's for family." She prayed he wouldn't call her bluff. After all, her face might be on TV these days, but she was no actress.

  "Families are the hottest ticket on TV," he said, and Erin couldn't help but chuckle. Leo had filmed three seasons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The crew of her show, You Only Live Once, better known as YOLO, had spent several hilarious happy hours listening to Leo's stories about that hot mess. By the time everybody'd had a few drinks, it didn't even matter if the stories were true.

  "Not my family. We're super boring. No sex tapes. No transgender parental figures. No rehab stints or DUI convictions. Not even a traffic violation."

  "Methinks thou dost protest too much." Leo's eyes were twinkling again, but Erin figured she was out of the danger zone. And then her phone started vibrating in her pocket.

  She reached for it so fast she accidentally knocked Sherri's arm with her elbow, splashing a few drops of her cherry red cocktail onto Sherri's off-white sweater dress.

  "Oof," Sherri said.

  "I'm so sorry," Erin said as her phone clattered to the floor. It landed faceup, and as she bent to retrieve it from the patterned carpet, she saw that it was Ben's name flashing across the screen. "Oh, thank God."

  She snatched the phone up and swiped the screen to answer, but she was too late. Missed call. "Crap," she muttered, and then her brain caught up with her eyes. If Ben was calling her from his cell—right now—that meant he wasn't in the air.

  Sherri gaped at Erin, paying no attention to the spreading pink splotches on her dress, her face mirroring Erin's shock.

  Erin swiveled on a heel and searched for a quiet corner, all the while fumbling to call Ben back. The call immediately went to voicemail, and she was cursing to herself when she realized both Sherri and Leo were following her. She held up one finger and ducked into an open meeting room with the lights turned off. Sherri and Leo exchanged a concerned look, but they didn't follow her in.

  The screen of her phone lit the darkened space with an eerie glow. Erin's fingers shook as she clicked Ben's name again, and she held her breath and prayed.

  It was ringing this time. She hoped that meant she'd caught him with his phone still on. Maybe his flight was just delayed a bit, and he was boarding now. Maybe he'd been too worried about worrying her, and that's why he hadn't returned her texts.

  After four rings, Erin was trembling to her very core, thinking he wasn't going to pick up. And then his voice finally burst onto the line. "Erin?"

  "Ben! Thank God you answered. What's going on? Where are you? Was your flight delayed?"

  There was a long pause, and Erin's stomach plunged as if she'd just leapt from the hatch of a plane, her second skydive.

  "Not delayed," he finally said. He paused again. "E, I've got some bad news."

  CHAPTER TWO

  First the Good News

  Four days earlier, in Texas

  "That's amazing! Oh, thank God. This whole thing has just been so heartbreaking."

  Erin was trying her best to listen to Ben as he explained in rushed, excited tones the details of a breakthrough he and his team had just made at work. It had to do with a clinical trial for an experimental viral therapy that showed promise for stopping tumor growth in an aggressive form of childhood cancer. The heartbreaking part was that Audrey Lester, a four-year-old girl from Odessa, Texas who'd been diagnosed with the rare type of cancer the therapy was designed to target, had recently been given months to live, or less. All stand
ard treatments had failed, which meant this experimental therapy was her family's last hope.

  Ben rattled off words and phrases people outside his field couldn't pronounce, let alone spell. The breakthrough had to do with a virus that would attack only the tumor cells, triggering them to die. It had taken months for Ben's team—and a partnering team at Johns Hopkins—to synthesize enough of the virus for one treatment, only to then discover a potential contaminant in the therapy. As a result, the FDA had halted the trial.

  Ben and his team had been working around the clock to identify the contaminant so the trial could continue. And apparently, that morning they'd learned the contaminant was a harmless by-product of the manufacturing process. Now they were rushing the results to the FDA in hopes that the trial could proceed in time to help Audrey.

  Erin was bursting with pride over what he was saying, even if she only understood roughly every fifth word of it. That tended to happen when Ben explained anything in detail about the work he did in genomics research for Texas Children's Medical Center.

  Between the complex scientific lingo he was rattling off, the barrage of instant messages pinging on her laptop screen from her show's executive producer, and the sundress she was trying to neatly roll up for her impending Tuscan honeymoon, she couldn't process much of what Ben was saying at all.

  So she was caught off guard when he asked, "Are you sure that's OK with you?"

  "I'm sorry, sweetie. What?" Erin was typing a response to Rishi, YOLO's production coordinator, with one hand while scanning the top of her dresser for the earrings she always wore with her denim minidress.

  "It's OK if I switch my flight?" he repeated. Or she assumed he was repeating it.

  She stopped moving—and breathing—for a second, sinking onto the corner of her bed with the gold and turquoise earrings in one hand, her phone in the other. "Switch your flight?" The confusion was clear in her voice. "Back up just a second. What does this breakthrough have to do with switching a flight? Do you mean the flight? Switching your flight to California?"

  There was a long pause during which she couldn't even hear him breathing, as if he were holding his breath.

  "I'm sorry, E," he finally said. "I've been talking a mile a minute, and I know you're busy. The team from Johns Hopkins that's working with us is on their way here to go over the results before we move forward. We've been collaborating with the head of their genomics team for a month trying to get to this point. We'd hoped to be there two weeks ago. And so the timing now is really unfortunate, but—"

  "Right now?" Erin interrupted him. Her voice was shrill, and she cleared her throat and aimed for a more even tone. "They're on their way to Dallas right now?"

  She tried to contain her panic. After all, this was groundbreaking, life-saving work they were talking about. But this was also their wedding. A wedding they'd been planning for nearly fourteen months. An out-of-town wedding with close to seventy guests. A wedding that was being filmed by a professional production crew and followed step by step by the 72,000 combined followers on Erin's blog and social media accounts. A wedding that would be telecast to an audience of roughly 1.5 million.

  "I'm sorry," Ben said again, drawing out the words in trepidation. "It's already a done deal. As soon as Melody notified Liang Chin, he booked their entire team onto the first flight out of Baltimore. They'll be in Dallas by this evening and in our lab first thing tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow," Erin repeated. "Our flight's not till Wednesday, though." Her voice was tinged with hope. "Surely you can meet with them tomorrow and still fly out the next day?"

  "I would, but Melody is putting together a presentation that she said won't be ready until Wednesday at the earliest." He started talking fast again before Erin could drop her two cents in on that. "Besides, I know Liang's team is going to have a thousand questions about the testing. And then we'll need to replicate the tests over the next couple of days and verify our findings before we present to the FDA, which I'm hoping we can do by video conference." There was a long pause during which Erin stood frozen in place, no longer moving at manic speed. What was the point?

  "Liang knows I'm getting married this weekend," Ben continued, defensive. "He and Melody know I absolutely have to fly out by Friday morning, and Liang knows Nate's coming out for the wedding, too. I told them I'll be out of pocket completely until after May first, which is part of the reason I can't leave now." He paused again. "Everybody's keyed up and so damned relieved, and you know there's no way this can wait. I'm just glad we figured it out in time for the Lesters. Honestly, after we found the contaminant in the virus structure, I thought it was all over. Back to the drawing board for everybody. I was dreading having to give the news to the family that we had to start again with the oncolytic virotherapy, even though I wouldn't even have been the one to do it."

  He'd lost her again with the science talk, but Erin understood enough of what he'd said for the hope to trickle back out of her. She didn't feel anything now, just numb.

  "And you have to be there for all of this?" She hated that she felt the need to ask.

  Ben was quiet for another long moment. "I am so sorry," he said again. "You know I wouldn't ask this if I didn't absolutely have to be there. But this is my research lab, my team." He paused. "This could be it, Erin."

  Erin rested her forehead in her free hand, knowing what "it" meant. Ben was staking his entire career on this, but "it" was much bigger than him. It was a step closer to a potential cure.

  "Well, that's that, then." She lifted her head and tried to inject some cheer into her voice, suppressing all the things she wanted to say. What if the testing takes longer than you expect? Or, What if something happens to delay your flight? Or, What about the climb Friday morning? We're supposed to be checking off our bucket list together. Or, the thing she wanted to say and knew Ben would hate hearing the most: What if Melody is dragging out this presentation on purpose to ruin the wedding? Ben knew how much Erin hated his boss. What he didn't know was why…because she wasn't entirely sure herself. The woman just gave Erin a bad vibe.

  Instead all she said was, "Of course I support you in this. Go ahead and change your flight, and we'll meet in Tahoe on Friday."

  It'd be fine. Of course it would be fine. There was no way Ben would leave her stranded at the altar.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Amazing Race

  April 12, Friday evening, in Tahoe

  Erin sank to the floor, flopping into a cross-legged position with her back against the paneled wall of the meeting room. The industrial-grade carpet, tan with a swirling green and burgundy pattern, scraped against her legs. Her head felt two sizes too big for her body.

  "Canceled?"

  The word was quiet, but Erin felt as if she were screeching, the word reverberating around the still, dark room. A small part of her brain wondered if Sherri and Leo were listening to her around the corner from the open doorway. She lowered her voice to a hiss-like whisper. "How can your flight be canceled? Why?"

  "There's a storm system hovering over DFW right now. A twister just touched down in Richardson, and there are tornado warnings all around the metroplex. All planes are grounded until further notice."

  Her barely contained panic swelled at the misery encasing his words. Ben, ever so practical, ever prepared and confident, was no match for an act of God.

  "But, but…surely it'll all be over soon, and they'll have planes out of there, right? A storm cell in central Texas blows up out of nowhere and leaves just as fast." After thirty-three years as a Dallasite, she knew this as well as Ben did. Erin allowed herself to feel an iota of hope. Until he said…

  "Well…"

  Erin waited. "Well, what?"

  Ben blew out a loud breath. "There've been these crazy straight-line winds, and people are saying there's debris and maybe some damage on a couple of the runways. With the storm it's already pitch-black out. This place is a damn mess right now."

  "Ben." She couldn't help it. That one light lit
tle word was loaded with fifty pounds of blame.

  Erin slammed her forehead into the palm of her left hand so hard it made a thwack sound. "What does this mean?" she asked after a moment. "Do they think you'll at least get out sometime tonight?"

  Ben's voice was muffled, like his face was in his hand, too. "I don't know. Nobody will answer any questions. Right now there's not even anybody at the desk. People are staking out rows of seats to sleep for the night."

  Erin's mind spun into calculation mode. It was 6:20 in Tahoe, which meant it was already 8:20 in Dallas. Ben's flight had been scheduled for a 5:52 takeoff. He'd be landing at Reno-Tahoe in an hour and a half if all had gone as planned.

  If any damn thing had gone as planned.

  All she wanted to do was yell at him, so she said nothing at all. For one thing, she had an audience, and one of those audience members was packing a video camera—Erin knew better than to expect otherwise. She could only hope Sherri had her back right now and was keeping tabs on Leo. For another thing, she and Ben weren't yellers. In the nearly four years they'd been dating, she could count on one hand the number of times they'd spoken harshly to each other. And in the twenty-seven years they'd known each other, they'd scarcely had an argument.

  She fought for control and lost. "This wouldn't be happening if you'd flown out this morning like you said you would."

  When she'd agreed to Ben's plan to postpone his flight, he'd told her he would reschedule for Friday morning, but circumstances kept interfering with his plans. First he and Nate had a setback with the testing. And then he found out Liang from the Johns Hopkins team had arranged a presentation with the FDA for Friday morning, and he and Melody—who Erin had nicknamed The Nemesis—insisted that Ben be the one to explain the lab results. When all was said and done, Ben had booked the latest Friday flight to Reno instead of the earliest one.

  He'd missed the climb, which he probably would have missed anyway. He was missing this cocktail reception, and now he was going to miss the wedding rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner Erin's mom had put so much work into. And unless their luck turned around fast, he was going to miss his own wedding.