7. Harper #2
“Your grandparents were specific about the marriage clause being witnessed properly, not just filed remotely. I take my instructions from the trust seriously, even years later.” He glances toward the ceremony room. “I understand today qualifies.”
“It does.”
Denise arrives a moment later, brisk and efficient in a blazer I’ve never seen her wear, carrying a folder of her own, the contract tucked inside it.
“Everyone’s here,” she says, glancing around at the small, strange collection of people gathered for what’s supposed to be the least significant version of a wedding imaginable. “Should we go in?”
“Ready?” Viktor asks me.
“Not even a little.”
“Good. Neither am I.”
That, somehow, helps more than if he’d said something reassuring.
The ceremony room is smaller than I expect, beige walls, a flag in the corner, a clerk who’s clearly done this so many times the words barely register as words to her anymore.
She calls our names off a clipboard, has us stand in front of her desk instead of an altar, and starts reading before either of us has fully settled into place.
“Do you, Viktor Markov, take Harper Wilcox to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
“I do.” He says it fast, flat, exactly the way I’d expect a man to say it if he meant nothing by it, except I know better now, know the flatness is armor more than indifference.
“Do you, Harper Wilcox, take Viktor Markov to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
“I do.” Mine comes out steadier than I feel, which I count as a small victory given the state of my hands twenty minutes ago.
“By the power vested in me by the state, I now pronounce you married. You may sign here, here, and here.”
We sign, Dimitri signing beneath us with the efficient scrawl of someone who’s filled out a thousand forms in his life, Denise signing as our second witness on the contract itself, everything happening in a small, orderly sequence that somehow still manages to feel enormous underneath its own paperwork.
“Congratulations,” the clerk says, already reaching for the next folder on her desk, already halfway to forgetting our names.
Warren Hastings waits until we’ve stepped back out into the hallway before he opens his own folder.
“Mrs. Markov.” He says it like he’s testing whether I’ll flinch at the new name, and I don’t, not really, not as much as I expected to. “As of this morning’s ceremony, the marriage clause in your grandparents’ trust is satisfied. I have the release documents here, if you’re prepared to sign.”
My throat goes tight in a way I don’t fully expect. “Now?”
“Now, if you’d like it done. Or we can schedule something more formal for another day.”
“No.” I glance at Viktor, who nods, steady, present, not pushing me either direction. “Now’s fine.”
Hastings spreads the papers across a small table near the window, and I sign where he indicates, hands slightly unsteady in a way that has nothing to do with the marriage this time and everything to do with a grandmother and grandfather I haven’t spoken to in years, releasing something they set aside for me before either of them died, a door I chose to leave locked until exactly this moment.
“That’s everything,” Hastings says, gathering the papers. “The funds will transfer within the week. Congratulations, on both counts.”
He shakes my hand, then Viktor’s, and excuses himself with the efficient, unbothered air of a man who’s finalized a hundred trusts and feels nothing extra about this one.
I stand there in the hallway holding a folder that represents money I haven’t touched in years and a marriage that’s four minutes old.
Dimitri excuses himself to take a call that conveniently starts ringing the second Hastings leaves, and Denise follows shortly after, offering me one last look, warm and a little knowing, before she goes.
Viktor and I stand there in the hallway, government fluorescents overhead, both of us slightly unsure what happens now that the thing we came here to do is done, twice over.
“That’s it,” I say. “We’re married. And apparently, I’m suddenly not broke.”
“We’re married.” He says it slower than the clerk did, testing the shape of it, ignoring the second half entirely, like the money means nothing to him one way or another, which, I’m realizing now, it probably doesn’t.
“Feels anticlimactic.”
“It’s supposed to.” He studies me for a second, his expression going quieter than at the club, quieter than at the park, like he’s seeing me clearly for the first time standing in a courthouse hallway on a Thursday morning. “Doesn’t mean it has to stay that way.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything at all, and he doesn’t push. He just keeps looking at me a beat longer than the moment strictly requires, long enough that I feel it in my chest instead of just noticing it with my eyes.
“I should get to work,” I say finally, because someone has to say something, and my voice is the only one available.
“I’ll walk you to your car.”
He does, hand resting lightly at the small of my back the entire way, not possessive, just there, and when we reach my car, he doesn’t try to kiss me, doesn’t push for anything the day hasn’t already offered.
He just watches me get in, waits until I’ve started the engine, and lifts two fingers off the doorframe, half a wave, half a promise this isn’t over.
I watch him in my rearview mirror the whole way out of the lot, and the look on his face follows me longer than it has any right to, all the way to work, sitting in my chest through the entire drive, a decision I made and a feeling I haven’t fully caught up to yet, both at once.
By the time I clock in, I’ve replayed the courthouse hallway probably a dozen times, the way he looked at me, the way he said, doesn’t mean it has to stay that way, like it was a promise instead of just a line.
I don’t know what to do with any of it. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel about a marriage that was only ever meant to be a piece of paper, and a trust fund I’d spent years pretending I didn’t need. And yet…
I’m married. The word still doesn’t feel like it belongs to me.
Somewhere underneath the disbelief, quieter than I want to admit, it doesn’t feel entirely wrong either.