7. Harper
HARPER
I wake up thinking about the fact that my future husband isn’t a stripper, which is possibly the strangest sentence I’ve ever thought before my alarm’s even gone off.
I lie there a minute longer, turning it over.
Viktor Markov, club owner, not club employee, a man whose family apparently had money going back a generation, who built something real out of that inheritance instead of just living off it.
It changes the shape of everything I thought I understood about the man I’m marrying in two days.
I could spend the whole morning on that thought if I let myself. I don’t let myself.
Today’s a long day: Denise at eleven, work after, and there isn’t room in any of it for sitting in bed reprocessing a man’s entire financial history. That’s a problem for another morning, one where I don’t have three separate things demanding my attention before nine.
I get up, get dressed, and by the time I’m out the door I’ve mostly managed to file Viktor’s apparent wealth into the same drawer where I keep everything else about him I don’t fully understand yet, filed but not forgotten, waiting for a calmer day to actually examine.
Denise’s office smells the same as always: burnt coffee, the air freshener nobody’s replaced since spring, and she looks up from her desk with the particular focus she reserves for anything that isn’t a straightforward custody update.
“You said this was important,” she says. “Sit.”
I sit. “I have an actual date now. Thursday.”
Denise sets her pen down slowly, processing it with the same care she applies to everything. “To Viktor Markov.”
“To Viktor Markov.”
“You’re sure about this.”
“I’m sure about this,” I say it steadier than I actually feel, though the steadiness surprises me a little, how much I mean it despite everything I still don’t fully know about him.
“I need your help making it official. The right way, not just a courthouse formality that falls apart the second anyone asks a real question.”
“Okay.” She pulls out a legal pad, all business now, the version of Denise I trust most. “Walk me through what you two have actually discussed.”
I tell her the plan as far as it exists.
The wedding Thursday. Ginger and I moving into Viktor’s house afterward.
A year, we’d agreed, roughly, though nothing’s been written down yet, just a shared understanding that this needs long enough to actually help the custody case without either of us being stuck in it forever.
“A year’s reasonable,” Denise says. “Long enough to look genuine to a judge, short enough that neither of you is trapped if it stops working. I’d want it in writing regardless. Verbal agreements between people who are also sleeping together tend to get complicated fast.”
“We’re not.” I stop myself, because we did kiss, and Denise raises an eyebrow like she already knew that before I opened my mouth.
“I’m your lawyer, Harper, not your mother.
I don’t need details. I need terms.” She starts writing.
“One year minimum, renewable by mutual agreement, dissolution requires thirty days’ written notice from either party, custody arrangement remains Harper’s regardless of marital status changes. Anything about finances I should know?”
“He said he’d cover the household. I wasn’t going to ask for anything beyond that.”
“You should ask for something beyond that. Not because you don’t trust him, because contracts exist for exactly the situations where trust turns out to be complicated later.” She keeps writing. “I’ll draft something reasonable.”
I let her handle it, because this is exactly why I hired her in the first place, and by the time we’re done, there’s an actual document taking shape, terms neither Viktor nor I had thought all the way through on our own.
“I’ll have the final draft ready by tomorrow. You can both sign before the ceremony.” Denise sets her pen down, studying me for a moment longer than the paperwork requires. “Can I say something off the record?”
“Go ahead.”
“I’ve watched a lot of clients do desperate things for custody cases.
Fake addresses, staged photos, one memorable incident involving a borrowed dog to look more stable.
” She almost smiles. “This is the first one that’s actually made me hope it works out for reasons that have nothing to do with the case. ”
“You think we’re going to make it.”
“I think you two look like something real wearing a contract as a disguise. I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before.
” She stands, signaling the meeting’s actual end.
“But for what it’s worth, Harper, I hope this one lasts.
Longer than a year. Longer than the case even needed it to. If he’s a good man.”
I don’t have a good response to that, so I just thank her and let myself feel for the first time all morning, something other than logistics.
By the time I get home that evening, Ginger’s at the kitchen table finishing homework, and I sit down across from her, the way I did the first time I told her about any of this custody stuff, months ago now.
“Hey, baby. I need to tell you something.”
She looks up, watchful in the specific way she still gets sometimes when a sentence starts like that. “Is it bad?”
“No. Good, actually.” I reach across and squeeze her hand. “Remember Viktor, from the park?”
“The swing pusher.”
“The swing pusher.” I smile despite myself. “We’re getting married tomorrow.”
Her eyes go wide. “Tomorrow, tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow, tomorrow.”
“Can I come?”
“Not this time. It’s a really small wedding, just some grown-up paperwork stuff. But afterward, we’re going to start getting ready to move into his house, all three of us together.”
Ginger considers this with the seriousness she brings to everything lately, working through the actual shape of what I’ve told her rather than just reacting to the surface of it. “Will I still see Mrs. Bennett?”
“Every day you want to, I promise.”
“Okay.” She nods, apparently satisfied, and goes back to her homework like the conversation’s fully resolved, and I sit there watching her, marveling again at how much steadier she’s gotten these last few months, how much less each new change seems to cost her now than it used to.
Tomorrow, I think, watching her erase something and start over with the patient concentration only a six-year-old brings to long division.
Tomorrow I become someone’s wife for real, on paper and everywhere else that matters, and somehow, sitting here in my own kitchen, it doesn’t feel like the leap it should.
Wedding Day
I’ve tried on four outfits by seven in the morning, which is absurd for a wedding with no guests, no cake, and no actual romance attached to it, and I still can’t decide if the navy dress looks like I’m trying too hard or not hard enough.
I go with the navy dress.
I stand in front of the mirror longer than I need to, smoothing a wrinkle that isn’t actually there, and I catch myself thinking about what Mia would say if she could see me right now.
Something dry, probably. Something about how I’ve never once done anything the easy way in my entire life, and here I’m proving her right one more time from wherever she’s watching, if she’s watching at all.
Ginger’s already at school by the time I’m doing my hair for the second time, dropped off twenty minutes early with a story about a dentist appointment that felt easier than the truth, and some part of me hates how easily the lie came out. She knows the real reason now, at least.
Today just isn’t the day I want to stand in a school drop-off line explaining the details.
My hands won’t stop shaking while I do my mascara, which is ridiculous, because again, this isn’t even a real wedding. It’s paperwork with a judge attached.
I tell myself that twice in the mirror and believe it exactly as much as I did the first time.
I text Denise on my way out the door, one line, doing this in an hour, and her reply comes back almost instantly, see you there, since she’s coming in person this time, not just checking in from her office.
The courthouse downtown has fluorescent lighting bright enough to make everyone look slightly ill, and I’m early enough that I get a bench near the window, phone in my lap, watching people shuffle through metal detectors with the particular blankness of anyone doing government paperwork before ten in the morning.
Viktor arrives twelve minutes later, and I see him before he sees me, which gives me exactly enough time to notice he’s wearing an actual suit, dark gray, nothing like the open shirt from the club or the jeans he wore pushing Ginger on a swing two days ago.
He clocks me across the lobby, and the tension in his shoulders drops, just slightly, and for a second neither of us says anything about the fact that the last time we actually talked, really talked, he was telling me the truth about the club while Ginger shrieked with joy on a swing a few feet away.
“You came,” he says instead, like there was ever a real chance I wouldn’t.
“So did you.”
“I did say I would.”
Dimitri’s a step behind him, and beside Dimitri, an older man I don’t immediately recognize, silver-haired, a leather folder tucked under one arm, dressed like someone who bills by the hour.
“Harper,” Dimitri says, nodding at me, then gestures to the older man. “This is my associate handling some of the paperwork today.”
“Actually,” the man says, extending a hand, “I believe we’ve spoken on the phone. Warren Hastings. Your grandparents’ estate attorney.”
It takes me a second to place the name, and then it lands all at once: the calls I made last week, the forms I signed and mailed back, the quiet arrangement I made to have the trust finalized the moment I was legally married, witnessed properly so there’d never be a question about the timing.
“You came in person,” I say, a little stunned. “I wasn’t expecting that.”