5. Harper
HARPER
My phone buzzes on the nightstand before my alarm does.
Morning, future wife. Sleep okay?
I stare at it longer than the message deserves, coffee not even started yet, and I still can’t decide if I want to laugh or throw the phone across the room.
We’re not married yet. You don’t have to keep this up in text messages nobody else can see.
His response comes back within a few minutes.
Force of habit already. Also, I liked how it sounded.
I read that one twice. My face goes warm in a way I blame entirely on not having had coffee yet, and I set the phone face down on the counter like that’ll stop it from happening again.
It buzzes again anyway.
Court’s going to want this believable. Might as well start early.
He’s not wrong. That’s the annoying part.
I’m still typing out a reply that isn’t quite as flustered as I actually feel when my phone rings for real, Denise’s name on the screen, and I answer before I’ve finished deciding what my face is doing.
“You’re engaged,” Denise says, no hello, which is how I know she’s already read the text I sent her sometime after midnight, when I couldn’t sleep and needed to tell someone before I lost my nerve.
“I’m engaged.”
“To a man you met two days ago.”
“Yesterday, technically. Well, the day before yesterday I met him. Yesterday he said yes.”
“Harper.” She says my name the way she says it when she’s about to be right about something I don’t want her to be right about. “I need you to walk me through this slowly, because on paper this looks either brilliant or like the worst decision of your life, and I genuinely can’t tell which yet.”
I walk her through it. The club, the offer, his name, the fact that I still don’t know his last name until she asks, and I have to admit I don’t, and there’s a pause on the line that tells me exactly how that sounds out loud.
“You’re marrying a man, and you don’t know his last name.”
“Markov. Viktor Markov. I know it now.”
“Okay.” She exhales, and I hear paper shuffling on her end, the sound of her already building a strategy instead of a lecture, which is one of the reasons I hired her in the first place.
“Here’s what matters. The hearing’s in three weeks.
Whenever you do this, it needs to happen soon enough that the marriage has time to look established, not thrown together the week of court.
I need you two doing normal things a couple does before then.
Seen together. Photos, if you can manage it naturally.
A joint bank account wouldn’t hurt, even a small one, once you’re actually married. ”
“He’s not going to want to merge finances with a stranger.”
“Then talk him into dinner somewhere public, at minimum, before the wedding. Judges don’t examine bank accounts as often as they examine whether two people act like they know each other.” A pause. “Do you actually know anything about him?”
“Not really.”
“Then learn something before Thursday, because if his own lawyer asks you his birthday and you go blank, that’s worse for us than never having met him at all.
And you two need an actual date set. What’s his address, for the record?
Where’s he going to be living, and where’s Ginger going to be sleeping when the caseworker asks. ”
“We haven’t gotten that far.”
“Get that far pronto. Today, ideally.” Denise’s voice softens, just slightly, the version she allows herself when she remembers I’m not just a case file.
“I’m not trying to scare you. I think this could genuinely help, once it’s actually done.
I just need it to hold up under questions, not just under a first glance. ”
“I understand.”
“Good. And Harper, one more thing.” She pauses long enough that I brace for something worse. “Congratulations, I think. Strange circumstances, but for what it’s worth, this was smart.”
I promise her I’ll figure out the rest, and we hang up. I stand in my kitchen holding a phone that suddenly feels heavier than it did five minutes ago.
Ginger’s not up yet. I’ve got maybe twenty minutes before I need to wake her for school, and I spend most of them staring at my coffee going cold, trying to figure out how you’re supposed to explain any of this to a six-year-old without using the word husband and watching her flinch.
I don’t manage it that morning. I decide it’s better to tell her after school, when there’s no rush, when I can actually sit with her instead of half listening while I hunt for her shoes.
That evening, after dinner, I sit her down on the couch with the lamp on instead of the overhead light, because somehow rooms feel less like bad news under a lamp.
“I want to tell you something,” I say. “About the court thing, with Grandma and Grandpa Ivanov.”
Ginger goes still in the specific way she goes still now whenever a sentence starts with, I want to tell you something. She’s gotten too good at bracing for bad news for a kid her age.
“Is it bad?”
“No. It’s actually good, I think. I’m getting married.”
She blinks at me. “Like a wedding?”
“Kind of. Not the big kind with a dress and cake. A small one, at the courthouse, soon, so the judge sees that you and I have someone else in our corner too.”
“Who?”
“His name’s Viktor. You haven’t met him yet, but you will soon.”
Ginger picks at a thread on the couch cushion, quiet in the way that used to mean nothing and now means everything. “Is he going to live with us?”
“Eventually, yeah.”
“Is he going to be like Dad?”
The question lands somewhere under my ribs, sharp enough that I have to sit with it a second before I answer, because I don’t actually know how to answer it honestly and gently at the same time.
“No, baby. Nobody’s trying to replace your dad or your mom. Viktor’s just someone who’s going to help me keep you here with me, where you belong.”
She nods slowly, still picking at the thread, and doesn’t ask anything else, which somehow worries me more than if she’d cried or argued or asked a dozen more questions I don’t have good answers for.
“You can still ask me stuff,” I tell her. “Any time. I won’t be upset.”
“Okay,” she says, and leans into my side instead, and I hold her there until the thread finally comes loose in her fingers and she seems to forget about it entirely, distracted by whatever’s on the television now. I let myself feel relieved and don’t examine it too closely.
My phone buzzes again once she’s in bed.
Viktor: Dinner tomorrow. Somewhere with cameras and other people who’ll remember seeing us. Your lawyer’s right, we need to look real.
Me: How do you know what my lawyer said?
Viktor: I don’t. Educated guess. Also, I’m apparently your future husband, I’m allowed instincts about your legal strategy.
I laugh out loud, alone in my kitchen, which is becoming a habit with this man.
Me: Fine. Dinner. Nothing weird.
Him: Define weird.
Me: You know exactly what I mean, Viktor.
Him: I’ll pick you up at seven. Wear something you’d actually wear, not something you think a judge would approve of. This needs to look real, not rehearsed.
The restaurant he picks the next night has actual tablecloths and a menu that doesn’t list prices next to the entrees, and I spend the first ten minutes sitting straight-backed across from him like I’m interviewing for a job I’m not sure I want.
“You can relax,” Viktor says, watching me over the top of his glass. “Nobody’s grading this.”
“I’m aware.”
“You’re sitting like you’re aware. I need you to look like you forgot.”
I let my shoulders drop, just slightly, and he almost smiles, causing my stomach to tighten in a way I choose to blame on the wine instead of him.
“Tell me something true,” he says. “Not for the judge. For me.”
“Like what?”
“Anything. Where you grew up. Your sister. Whatever you feel like giving me.”
So I do, in pieces, more than I mean to.
I tell him about Mia, about the two of us splitting a bedroom until I was fourteen, and about the year she taught me to drive in an empty parking lot because our mother refused.
He listens like he’s actually listening, not just waiting for his turn, and somewhere between the appetizer and the entrée I forget I’m supposed to be performing anything at all.
“She sounds like she was a good sister,” he says, when I finally stop talking long enough to notice I’ve been talking for ten straight minutes.
“She was the better one, honestly. Braver. Louder. I was always the one hanging back.”
“Doesn’t match what I saw two nights ago.” He says it plainly, no weight behind it, and somehow that makes it land harder than if he’d meant it as a line. “You walked into my club and proposed marriage to a stranger. That’s not someone who hangs back.”
“That was desperation, not bravery.”
“Sometimes those look identical from the outside.”
I don’t have a good answer for that, so I take a sip of wine instead and let the silence sit for a second, comfortable in a way I didn’t expect from a dinner that was supposed to be a performance.
“What about you?” I ask eventually. “Fair’s fair.”
“I grew up around men who didn’t talk about their feelings and a mother who talked about everyone else’s instead.” His jaw tightens, just barely, there and gone before I can name it. “That’s the polite version.”
“And the honest version?”
“Ask me again after we’ve known each other longer than four days.”
It’s not really an answer, but the way he says it makes me let it go instead of pushing, and the rest of dinner passes easier than I expect, actual conversation instead of two strangers rehearsing lines for a courtroom neither of us wants to be in.
He asks about Ginger, real questions: what she likes, what makes her laugh, and I catch myself watching his face while I answer, trying to work out whether he’s asking because Denise told me to make this look real or because he actually wants to know.
I don’t reach a conclusion by the time the check comes.
By the time he drops me off at home, the porch light’s the only thing on, and he walks me to the door instead of just idling at the curb, which I notice but don’t mention.
“Thank you,” I say, keys already in hand. “For tonight. For all of it.”
“You don’t have to thank me every time.”
“I know. I’m going to anyway.”
He’s closer than I realize, close enough that I have to tilt my head up slightly, and neither of us moves for a second that stretches out longer than it should.
Then he kisses me.
It’s not gentle or polite, nothing like I’d have guessed from a man who spent an entire dinner watching me like he was cataloging every word I said.
His hand finds the side of my jaw, his other arm curving around my waist, pulling me in instead of leaving space between us, and I forget for several full seconds that this was ever supposed to be a business arrangement.
I kiss him back before I decide to, which is somehow worse than if I’d meant to.
When I finally pull back, my breath’s uneven and my hands are braced against his chest, so they need to stay there to keep me upright, and I can’t read what’s happening on his face, only that it isn’t nothing.
He doesn’t say anything right away. Neither do I. The porch light hums overhead, and somewhere down the street a car door slams, ordinary sounds from an ordinary night that don’t match what just happened between us at all.
“Goodnight, Viktor,” I manage, and I’m inside with the door shut and locked before he can answer, back pressed against the wood, heart going too fast for a kiss that was supposed to mean absolutely nothing.
I stand there long enough to hear his car pull away, and even then I don’t move, still catching my breath over something Denise would call excellent optics and I don’t have a name for at all.