Page 15 of The Four Engagement Rings of Sybil Rain

I REGRET THE MOHALA PEPPERMINT BODY WRAP THE MOMENT THE aesthetician starts slathering it on my body the next morning.

She told me mohala means “heart opening” and described the treatment as “cooling and reinvigorating,” which had sounded exactly like what I needed.

After saying good night to Jamie last night, my whole body had been left hot and tingling—and I knew it wasn’t the twisted ankle.

I barely slept. I woke up this morning feeling almost hungover, even though all I’d had to drink was that one mai tai when I first arrived.

It was clear I needed a detox, something to douse the feelings racing through my blood.

The spa, with its private treatment rooms, seemed like a safe place to spend the day. Not that I’m hiding exactly, but…

Okay fine, I’m hiding. It’s the only rational thing to do.

Now, however, I just feel like I’ve been rolled in a snowdrift.

My skin is so “invigorated” I can’t relax.

All I want is to let the tranquility of the spa room lull me into a soft doze where, for a few minutes at least, I can forget running into my ex-fiancé with his gorgeous girlfriend and then panic lying about being on a romantic vacation with a nonexistent boyfriend of my own.

Where I can even forget Jamie carrying me—somewhat begrudgingly, yet with gentleness—the rest of the way down the hike yesterday.

Our bodies smashed together that close, the wetness of his shirt, the sharpness of his jaw, the way his eyes, so determined, looked ahead at the path but occasionally, I caught him glancing down at me…

Memory morphs into imagination. I see Jamie press me backward until my spine scrapes along the bark of a palm tree, my arms pinned above my head.

I grind against him the way I wanted to before, willing him even closer.

Jamie pulls my bathing suit top to the side before his mouth closes around my peaked—

I jolt my eyes open.

Finally, after what feels like an eternity, the aesthetician returns and pulls off the Saran Wrap that has kept me swaddled up like a Christmas-flavored Swiss roll.

After she leaves, I rinse off in the shower attached to the service room, and the hot water is a welcome relief.

It sluices off the rest of the peppermint wrap, and warmth suffuses me.

Stepping out of the shower, I do feel invigorated, and my skin feels more supple and soft than I can ever remember it being.

I guess it was worth twenty minutes of suffering to feel this good.

I slip into another cozy bathrobe and head through the locker room door to the spa pool.

Water trickles down a carved stone wall, and the soothing sounds of a reed pipe play over the crashing of the ocean waves just a few yards away.

There’s a spread of healthy treats laid out, so I grab a glass of cucumber-infused water and a small ramekin filled with almonds before seeking out an empty lounge chair.

Across the pool, I see a woman with two teenage daughters—the same ones I saw on the snorkel boat yesterday, though I leapt off and swam away before getting a chance to actually meet them.

One is more like a preteen, maybe eleven or twelve, and the other sister’s older, probably sixteen or seventeen.

I can’t help but see myself at both ages: the carefree seventh-grade Sybil who still believed in backyard faeries and alien conspiracies, and the senior-year Sybil—rebellious, confused, constantly ashamed of something, and rapidly getting swallowed up in a relationship with Liam.

At the time I was dating him, I felt so mature, but looking at this teen girl now, I am struck by how young and clueless I really was.

Too much happened too quickly, and I still have the scars today, though they’re invisible to pretty much everyone else.

If things had gone the way Liam had wanted, I’d be married to him now.

In that version of reality, I could be the one here at the spa with an eleven-year-old daughter.

I don’t even realize that I’m crying until a spa attendant appears at my elbow, silently offering me a tissue.

“Sorry,” I say, dabbing at my eyes. “Must have some peppermint oil in my eye or something.”

“There’s no need to apologize,” the attendant says.

She has a kind face and calm energy. Something about her reminds me of Gwendolyn Green—maybe it’s the linen shirt and pants.

“People often have strong emotional responses after their treatments,” she says.

“It’s a natural reaction to your body feeling a sense of relief. Of peace. Please don’t be embarrassed.”

I nod, thanking her again for the tissue, and watch as she walks away. But it’s not peace I feel washing over me in waves. It’s that same wobbly uncertainty I remember from my wedding weekend.

O N THE T HURSDAY MORNING before I was supposed to get married, I hopped in an Uber to LAX and boarded a flight bound for Vegas. Cliché, I know, the runaway bride escaping to Sin City, but I wasn’t going there to gamble, or party, or even elope. I was going to center myself.

The night before, at my last-minute, pseudo-bachelorette party, the reality of what I was about to do hit me like a freight train.

I, Sybil Rain, was getting married. For real this time.

This wasn’t a hormone-fueled teenage mistake, like it had been with Liam.

It wasn’t a half-baked flight of romantic fancy like it had been with Seb. This was the real deal.

This was forever.

And my body was full-on rejecting it. I’d felt off all night, seizing up with cramps in my abdomen, and despite trying to distract myself with the company of my closest friends, I returned to my hotel suite a weepy, mascara-dripping mess, trying on my wedding gown in the middle of the night because I was convinced it wouldn’t fit.

But it wasn’t the dress that was the problem.

It was me.

And the secret I’d been holding in from everyone.

Which was why I had to talk to Gwendolyn Green.

She’s my therapist and a renowned wellness coach, but she’s more than that.

She’s the one person who knows every detail about my history.

What happened with Liam back in high school, and everything since.

She was the only person I could think of who could help stop my spiraling and understand the source of it.

Only the problem with renowned wellness coaches is that they’re in very high demand, and as I frantically dialed her office over and over with no answer, I began to realize I might not get ahold of her. Which was when I looked her up on social media, and saw she was giving a talk in Vegas.

For anyone else, I understand that it might seem a little not normal to ditch your wedding to fly out and see your therapist give a speech on women’s health and wellness in the hopes of cornering her for a private session after… but I’m not normal.

In more ways than one.

So, heart beating out of my chest the whole way, I told my mom a little white lie—that I needed a special spa treatment—and instead flew to Vegas, touched down, and went straight to the MGM Grand.

By some miracle—and a ticket vendor who was a very good listener—I scored a last-minute pass for the conference and slipped into Gwendolyn’s talk minutes before it was about to start.

Just seeing her take the stage at the MGM Grand in a cream linen top with matching flowy pants put me instantly in a better place.

Her ash-blond hair hung in waves to her collarbone.

Her sharp gray eyes surveyed the crowd from behind her green-rimmed glasses.

The speech was brilliant—funny, moving. She spoke about the power of self-commitment amid the toxic messaging of society, how no advances in women’s health and medical research can be achieved without committed large-scale action.

But, to be honest, I wasn’t listening that hard.

I fidgeted the whole time, waiting for it to be over so I could corner her alone.

As soon as the speaking portion of the event wrapped, I hurried to the book-signing line.

I needed to talk to Gwendolyn face-to-face.

Finally, I reached the front, and she blithely held out her hand to sign my book, when suddenly, she looked up and saw it was me.

“Sybil! So nice to see you! But… what are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you. I—” I looked over my shoulder at the line behind me, feeling out of place and foolish. But I barreled on. “I know it’s not your policy but I’m hoping we could have an emergency session later today? Something has come up.”

“Sybil, aren’t you supposed to be getting married this weekend? I—I really don’t think this is appropriate. Of course I want to help you out, but this isn’t the right place and time.”

I think that was when I started crying.

She stood up from behind the table and hugged me. I grabbed her shoulders and whispered something quietly in her ear. I needed her to understand how urgent this was. What I was most afraid of in the world.

She hugged me again, tighter this time, then stood back, and said in words that rang something deep within me:

“Sweetheart. I’m so sorry. But I need you to hear me, Sybil. What you need isn’t a therapist right now. What you need is a doctor.”

A FTER THE SPA, I go back to my room and order room service for lunch. I’m not risking running into Jamie and Genevieve again at one of the resort restaurants. I just need to make it to the day after tomorrow, when he said they’d be leaving.

While I wait for the food to arrive, I unzip the luggage that I have yet to unpack.

When I used to travel with Jamie, he found it insanely annoying that I would take so long to settle into our hotel rooms, usually letting my clothes spill out of my open luggage for days until I couldn’t tell what was clean and what was dirty.