Chapter 7
SEVEN
ELLIE
Two days after my wedding, I was still married.
A temporary condition, technically. I’d tucked the license in my purse after the ceremony with every intention of dealing with it.
But it wasn’t done yet, partly because something always seemed more pressing and partly because every time my hand brushed against the envelope I remembered the warmth of Daniel’s mouth and lost the thread of whatever I’d been doing.
I’d handle it. The safest thing would be to shred it, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do that yet.
What if this was the last thing Grandpa ever signed?
Most importantly, it was still unfiled, which meant the whole situation remained theoretical and reversible, and not a thing I needed to examine too closely.
That was my story, and I was sticking to it.
I’d been at the hospital as much as I could manage.
Patrice Wembley, who’d worked at Granger Hardware for fifteen years before her retirement and who showed up like a force of nature whenever the situation called for it, had taken over the store without being asked, arriving Monday morning with her reading glasses on her head, her keys already in hand, and a scowl that dared anyone to suggest she needed instructions.
I’d shown up to open and found her already there, the register counted and the signage turned, waving me away with the authority of a woman who had outlasted three recessions and knew exactly what she was doing.
I owed Patrice Wembley a very large fruit basket and possibly my firstborn.
By Tuesday afternoon, Grandpa wasn’t struggling with his sudoku as much as he had on the first day after the stroke, when the pencil had jerked across the page, his brow furrowed with the effort of fighting his own synapses for every number.
His speech was still a little thick on one side, and he didn’t want to admit he tired more quickly.
But his eyes were clear and sharp, focused on the puzzle with the impatience of a man who never did anything halfway.
He’d improved. Not not miraculous, but better, and I held onto that with both hands.
I sat in the chair by the window, watching him and thinking about the kiss.
Specifically, about the part where Daniel’s arms slid around me and drew me in closer.
Not part of our hastily conceived plan. Not at all.
I’d been close to him before. We were friends.
We’d been hugging for years with the easy familiarity that didn’t require any thought.
But this was different. This was body to body, chest to chest, mouth to delicious, devastating, warm mouth.
He’d been so solid, close enough that the ridges of muscle beneath his clothes imprinted on my palms. I’d absorbed the steadiness of him, the sheer physical fact of him, in a way that short-circuited something essential in my brain.
And that mouth. Lord, have mercy, the man could kiss.
We’d been friends forever, and I knew he wasn’t a monk, though the details of his romantic life were somewhere we had, by some unspoken mutual agreement, never ventured.
But clearly he’d had enough experience in his life to have honed his craft considerably in that particular department.
I wanted to do it again.
No matter how many times I talked myself around it and back and around it again, that was the conclusion I came to every time.
Stripped of all the context and the circumstances and the extremely compelling case I kept constructing for why it meant nothing, what remained was a simple, inconvenient, and extremely loud truth: I wanted to kiss my best friend again.
My fake husband. The man I’d married in a hospital room as part of a scheme to make my dying grandfather happy.
Except that the license sat in my purse, and the officiant had been perfectly official, and nothing about that kiss felt fake, and—
None of it mattered because this was a performance.
A two-person play, staged for an audience of one.
The moment that audience no longer needed it, the curtain would come down, and we’d go back to being what we’d always been, which was the most important thing either of us had.
I wouldn’t blow that up over a kiss that ran approximately ten seconds longer than planned and fried my brain circuits.
The ring on my finger caught the late afternoon light slanting in through the window. I stared at it for a long, still moment before making myself look away.
“He beat me at rummy this morning,” said a voice from the doorway.
I looked up. Sandra, one of the nurses I’d gotten to know over the last few days—fifties, efficient, with the warmth of someone who’d learned to care without losing themselves to it. She leaned against the doorframe with a chart under one arm and a smirk of genuine bemusement.
“I’m sorry?”
“Your grandfather.” She nodded at him. “He asked if I played rummy. I said I did. Big mistake.” She gave Grandpa a glare that was mostly fond. “Three hands in a row, and then he suggested we play for pudding cups.”
Grandpa didn’t glance up from his sudoku. “She still owes me a butterscotch.”
Sandra shook her head, smiling, and then shifted into something more professional.
“His reaction time is better than it was two days ago. Speech is a little cleaner. He’s still got the left side weakness, and he tires quickly, but the trajectory is encouraging.
” She paused. “Dr. Whitfield will be by tomorrow. I don’t want to speak out of turn, but I don’t think he’s going to be unhappy with what he sees. ”
Something in my chest loosened, just a fraction. “That’s—thank you. That’s really good to hear.”
She smiled, warm and genuine. “I don’t know if it means anything, but I’ve been doing this a long time.
When people have something to hold on to, something that gives them a reason, it makes a difference.
” She glanced between me and Grandpa. “I think getting you two married gave him that. Something to look forward to instead of just waiting.” She straightened, tucking the chart under her arm.
“Oh, and I found the license sitting on the desk at the nurse’s station on Sunday.
The night nurse mentioned she’d found it under his bed.
I didn’t want it to get lost in the shuffle with everything going on, so I popped it in the mail for you. ”
My ears began to ring.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice came out remarkably steady, which was extraordinary, given the panic boiling beneath it. “You — what?”
Sandra was already half-turned toward the door.
“The marriage license. It was just sitting there, and I figured you’d forgotten about it with everything on your plate.
Since it wasn’t leaving town, the county clerk should’ve gotten it this morning.
” She smiled over her shoulder. “Congratulations again, by the way. He’s a keeper, that husband of yours. ”
She left before I could form a single coherent word.
I sat stone still.
Grandpa laid down his pencil and regarded me with an expression of mild and entirely unconvincing innocence. But he couldn’t have had anything to do with this. No, this was our reckless plan biting us in the ass.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“No,” I said, on pure autopilot. “Everything’s fine.”
Everything was, in fact, the exact opposite of fine, which seemed like a woefully inadequate way to describe the situation.
The license I’d believe to be in my purse, the license I’d been meaning to deal with and hadn’t, the license that was the entire structural load-bearing wall of our plan, was in the custody of the United States Postal Service—or possibly already in the hands of the county clerk—and I couldn’t do a damned thing about it.
I reached into my purse anyway, with hands that remained steady through an act of sheer will, and searched for the rectangular shape of the envelope.
My fingers found my wallet. My keys. A receipt from the pharmacy.
I looked at Grandpa.
He picked up his pencil and returned to his sudoku with the serene focus of a man with a clear conscience.
“Grandpa,” I said carefully. “Did you—”
“I’m doing my sudoku, sweetheart.”
I pressed my lips together. I inhaled for four, held for two, and released on a slow count of six. The deep breathing exercise had never once in my life made me feel better, but I tried it anyway on the theory that maybe this time would be different.
It was not different.
I stayed another hour because leaving felt impossible and because Grandpa was good today, genuinely good, more alert and more himself than he’d been.
I wouldn’t waste that by sitting in a parking lot having a quiet breakdown.
He talked, and I listened and laughed in the right places and managed not to betray by word or expression or any discernible twitch the fact that I was running the same calculation over and over in the back of my mind and arriving each time at the same impossible answer.
When I finally said my goodbyes, I kissed his forehead and made myself smile one last time at the door. I got exactly as far as the elevator before I pulled out my phone.
My thumbs hovered over the screen.
Ellie: We have a problem.
I stared at it for a long moment, then deleted it.
All of it, letter by letter, like undoing something I’d almost made irreversible.
I couldn’t just hit Daniel with this over text.
A block of words on a screen, a notification he’d read between calls or over a bad cup of station coffee—that wasn’t how you delivered news like this.
This wasn’t a heads up kind of situation.
This was an I need to see your actual face kind of situation.
I needed to see his, and honestly I probably needed him to see mine too, because I was fairly certain that whatever face I was currently making wasn’t one a person should be alone with.
The elevator doors opened. I stepped inside.