Chapter 9
NINE
The courthouse had not been my plan.
My plan had been to drive straight to the station, find Daniel, and tell him what Sandra had said.
Simple. Direct. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty with traffic, through the kind of sleepy mid-morning streets that Huckleberry Creek specialized in, where you caught every red light and still made it across town in under half an hour.
Except that somewhere around the intersection of Main and Caldwell, my hands had turned the wheel toward downtown instead, because I needed to know for certain before I said it out loud.
I needed to confirm it with an official source, in official language, in a room with fluorescent lighting and laminate countertops that left no room for ambiguity.
Thirty minutes later I was sitting in the parking lot of the Huckleberry Creek county clerk’s office, staring at the windshield and processing what the county clerk had told me in the patient, pleasant tone of someone delivering ordinary information.
The marriage license of Daniel James Costello and Penelope Rose Granger had been received and filed as a matter of public record, effective as of this morning.
Back in my car, I sat with that knowledge. Across the street, a woman unload groceries from the back of a minivan. Traffic rolled by on the road. I thought of nothing at all, which was the only thing my brain seemed capable of, until my hands stopped shaking enough that I trusted myself to drive.
I wasn’t considering what I’d be walking into.
I was thinking about the news I had to deliver, about the quality of Sandra’s smile as she’d glanced back over her shoulder, and about the fact that Grandpa had been sitting in that hospital bed doing his sudoku with the absolute serenity of a man who had never once in his life done anything he considered a mistake.
Which was something I should probably analyze at length, in detail, at a time when I had the bandwidth for it.
Right now my brain was full to the brim, every available synapse occupied.
There was no room left for anything else.
That was my excuse for why it took me a beat too long to register what was happening when I walked through the front door of the station and almost collided with a man I was pretty sure was one of the paramedics.
He stopped dead at the sight of me like I’d materialized out of thin air in the middle of his path. “Oh, hey — congratulations.”
I blinked at him. “I’m sorry?”
He looked a little uncertain in the way people did when they’d offered something they weren’t quite sure had landed the way they meant. “On the wedding? You’re Ellie, right? Daniel’s—” He made a small, open-handed gesture, the kind that stood in for a word he wasn’t sure how to finish.
Daniel’s. The word sat there between us in the echo of the entryway, patient and expectant, waiting for its noun.
Before I could produce one, Moose appeared from around the corner.
He looked delighted for reasons I couldn’t fathom.
“Ellie.” My name held the tone of proclamation, like he was announcing my arrival to the room at large.
“You’re here. Congratulations, we’re all—I mean, we’re so excited.
How’s Gus? Is everything all right? We heard about the hospital, and then we heard about the wedding, and—I mean, seriously, about time, we’ve all been saying for years—”
I cut across whatever it was they’d all been saying, because I could feel my composure beginning to develop small, structural cracks.
“Grandpa is improving,” I said, on autopilot, the words coming out steady and practiced because I’d said them enough times in the past twelve hours that they’d worn a groove.
My brain, meanwhile, was still three steps behind, scrambling to catch up on the more pressing question of how any of these people knew about the wedding.
The ceremony had taken place in a hospital room.
There had been four people present, plus Grandpa in the bed. How had it—?
Donna. The name surfaced from somewhere beneath everything else, quiet and inevitable.
The notary. Who presumably had mentioned it to one person, who had mentioned it to another, because this was Huckleberry Creek and that was the natural order of things here.
Reliable as the weather. Information moved through this town the way water moved through limestone—with quiet persistence, finding every crack.
I’d been so consumed with everything else pressing down on me that the possibility hadn’t even grazed the edge of my thoughts.
“That’s so great, that’s just so awesome—” Moose was still talking, warm and genuine and completely overwhelming, both hands clasped together like a man at a revival, and I was nodding along and working very hard to keep my expression somewhere in the general neighborhood of normal while the full weight of the entire town knows we got married settled itself on top of everything else that was already stacked in my chest.
“Moose.”
Diego Rivera materialized at Moose’s elbow, seemingly from nowhere, the way he always seemed to, as if he’d just decided to exist in a particular spot and had done so quietly and without announcement.
He looked at me once, a brief and careful assessment, and something shifted in the set of his expression.
“Go check on the coffee,” he said to Moose, without looking away from me.
“The coffee’s fine, I literally just made it.”
“Moose.”
Moose went.
Diego looked at me with the stillness of someone who had spent enough time around people carrying more than they were showing that he’d learned how to handle them carefully. “He’s in the bay,” he said. Nothing else. Just that.
He walked me through the common room without fanfare, without commentary, without asking any of the things I wasn’t remotely equipped to handle.
Powell Ferguson glanced up from the table as we passed, took one unhurried look at my face, and looked back down at his phone without a word.
I was grateful to him in a distant, floaty way that existed just at the edge of conscious awareness.
Diego pushed open the heavy bay door and held it for me. Daniel was at the workbench with his back to us, turning something over in his hands—some small mechanical piece I couldn’t identify from across the room—and he looked up when the door swung open on its hinges.
“Your wife’s here,” Diego said, without a trace of inflection, and then he was gone, the door swinging shut behind him with a soft, definitive click, and it was just the two of us in the enormous, echoing quiet of the bay.
Daniel set the thing down on the workbench and looked at me across the wide stretch of concrete floor between us.
He said nothing at first. He was doing the thing he always did, taking stock in that patient way that had always made me feel both seen and a bit transparent, waiting for me to get to it in my own time.
“The whole town knows,” I said.
“Yeah.” He pushed off the workbench and straightened. “Donna, probably.”
“Donna,” I confirmed. I’d replayed the conversation on a loop the whole drive over. “I didn’t even think—“ I stopped. Tried again. “I didn’t consider any of that. We didn’t consider any of that.”
“No.” The word was simple and without apology. “We didn’t.”
I pressed my lips together. “I went to the courthouse.”
Surprise flickered in his eyes, quick and unguarded, but he held himself still and waited for me to explain.
“Before I came here. I needed to confirm it before I said it out loud to you, because saying it out loud to you makes it real.” I looked at him across the polished concrete.
“The license has been filed, Daniel. Sandra mailed it. I guess it fell out of my purse somewhere at the hospital and ended up at the nurses’ station, and she mailed it because she thought I’d simply forgotten about it with everything going on with Gus.
” I stopped. Made myself finish it. “It’s been received and processed.
It’s on record. We’re actually, legally, really married. ”
The bay settled into a deep, thick quiet around us. Somewhere outside, traffic moved past on the street. In here, nothing moved at all.
Daniel looked at me for a long moment, his expression doing something complicated and unreadable. Then he said, “Okay.”
“Okay,” I repeated, incredulous. “That’s your response? Okay?”
“I mean.” He spread his hands in that easy, disarming way of his. “It’s not okay in the sense that it went according to any kind of plan. But the world didn’t end, Ellie.”
“We’re married, Daniel.”
“We are.”
“By accident.”
“Technically by Sandra,” he said, “but yes.”
The laugh that came out of me was not entirely voluntary.
It escaped before I could catch it. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and wrestled it under control as I looked up at the ceiling of the bay, which was very high and thoroughly unhelpful.
“Gus is improving. Which is wonderful, obviously. It’s the only thing I actually wanted, but it also means the plan has a longer runway than we thought, and the whole town already thinks—”
“Come over tonight,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”
I looked at him. He looked back at me with that steadiness of his, solid and unhurried, and I couldn’t tell if it was genuine calm or something he’d arranged for my benefit, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to figure it out right now. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“Tonight,” I said.
He nodded once, like it was already settled.
From somewhere deeper inside the station, a voice rose in a passionate and clearly losing argument about something—football, maybe, or whose turn it was to clean the kitchen—followed by a collective groan and what sounded like Powell’s distinctive bray of laughter.
The ordinary, rumbling noise of the place, unbothered by the extraordinary thing sitting in the middle of the bay between us like a piece of furniture neither of us knew where to put.
I looked down at the ring on my finger. Then back up at Daniel.
“The whole town,” I said.
“The whole town,” he confirmed, and his mouth curved at the corner. “It will be okay.”
How many times had he said that to me in our life? Somehow he always made it true. So I shoved down the panic and nodded back. “Tonight.”
“Tonight,” he agreed.
“I’ll bring pizza.”
I turned and walked back through the door, and behind me, in the quiet I left in my wake, I heard something low and warm that might have been a quiet laugh, or might have been nothing at all. Either way, I felt it somewhere it had absolutely no business being felt, and I kept walking.