8. Nichole
— ? —
Nichole
No church. No dress. No aisle.
A conference table in a law office downtown, the kind with leather chairs and neutral art and windows that look out over a city I’ve never felt like I belonged to.
Two witnesses I’ve never met before - a paralegal with a tight smile and an associate who keeps checking his phone between forms. A man in a gray suit reading from a document that reduces my entire life to clauses and signatures.
Twelve minutes, start to finish.
I sign my name on the line marked with a yellow tab, and the pen skips.
Catches on something - a fiber in the paper, a tremor in my hand - and leaves a small scar across the first letter.
I have to go over it twice. So my wedding signature has a flaw built into it, a little imperfection that will live in some file cabinet forever.
Callum signs after me. His handwriting is precise, controlled, exactly what you’d expect from a man who’s spent his whole life being taught how to put his name on things that matter.
“Congratulations,” the gray-suited man says, gathering papers. He doesn’t mean it. He knows what this is. Lawyers always know.
We walk out into the afternoon light as husband and wife, and no one on the street has any idea that the world just shifted.
The car is waiting at the curb. Black, expensive, the kind with a driver who opens doors and pretends not to hear conversations. Callum holds the door for me - not out of romance, but because that’s what he was raised to do, and some programming runs deeper than circumstance.
I slide in. He follows. The door closes, and we’re sealed inside this small, private space, and suddenly I can’t remember how to arrange my hands.
“The arrangement,” Callum says, as the car pulls away from the curb. His voice is businesslike, efficient. We’ve stepped out of the signing and straight into a meeting. “We should go over the terms.”
“We went over the terms.”
“The practical terms.” He pulls out his phone, scrolling through something.
Notes, maybe. A checklist. “Separate bedrooms, but adjoining. The suite at the end of the east wing - there’s a door between the rooms that locks from both sides.
You’ll have the larger space; there’s a sitting area you can use privately. ”
I nod because nodding seems to be expected.
“Public appearances as required. Charity events, dinners, the social calendar my mother has been building for forty years. You’ll need a wardrobe. We’ll handle that this week.”
“I have clothes.”
“You have clothes for the life you had. Not for this one.” He says it without judgment, just fact. “The people in these rooms know the difference between off-the-rack and couture at fifty paces. We’re selling a story. The details matter.”
I think about the water stain on my good shoes. The dress I wore to my parents’ funeral because it was the only black thing I owned. The life I had, which is past tense now, which ended when I signed my name on a yellow tab in a room full of leather chairs.
“What else?” I ask.
“Staff talk. They always do, no matter how much you pay them not to. So we live the performance, even behind closed doors.” He puts the phone away.
“Breakfast together when I’m home. Visible affection in common areas - nothing excessive, but enough.
If anyone asks about the wedding, we eloped.
Romantic spontaneity. They’ll believe it because they want to believe it. ”
“And your mother?”
His jaw tightens. Just slightly, just for a second. “My mother will believe what she wants to believe. What matters is that she can’t prove otherwise.”
The car slides through traffic, past buildings I recognize and buildings I don’t, past the neighborhood where I grew up and the neighborhood where I’ll never live again. I watch the city rearrange itself outside the window and try to feel something other than numb.
“No one knows,” Callum says. “That’s the most important thing. Not the staff, not my mother, and especially not Olivia.”
“You said that already.”
“I’m saying it again.” He turns to face me for the first time since we got in the car. “My daughter has already lost too many people. If she thinks you’re her mother - her real mother, permanent, staying - and then finds out it was a transaction-”
“I know.” My voice comes out sharper than I intended. “You don’t have to explain what it would do to her. I’m not the one who built this arrangement.”
Silence. The car hums along beneath us, smooth and expensive and completely indifferent to the conversation happening inside it.
“There’s one more thing,” Callum says.
He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a small box. Black velvet, the kind that comes from jewelers who don’t put prices in the window. He holds it out to me.
I don’t take it.
“Open it,” he says.
I open it.
The ring inside is beautiful. Of course it is, it’s probably been in his family for generations, or it was custom-designed by someone who charges more per hour than I made in a week, or it came from some vault where rich people keep the things they’ve accumulated that they don’t know what to do with.
The stone catches the light from the window and throws tiny rainbows across the leather seats.
I stare at it for a long moment.
“It’s very beautiful,” I say finally. “I’ve never hated anything so much.”
Callum doesn’t flinch. “Wear it anyway.”
I slide the ring onto my finger. It fits perfectly, which means someone measured while I wasn’t paying attention, or he guessed well, or the universe has a sick sense of humor. Probably all three.
The rest of the drive passes in silence. I watch the ring on my finger catch the light every time we pass under a streetlamp, throwing those tiny rainbows across my skin. A beautiful prison. A gilded chain.
The price of my brother’s life, measured in carats.
That night, after the staff have been told and the champagne has been poured and all the performances have been performed, I sit in my new room - the larger one, with the sitting area and the view of the water - and stare at the ceiling.
The door between my room and Callum’s is closed. Locked from my side, probably locked from his. Two people who signed a contract and called it a marriage, sleeping ten feet apart in a house that belongs to neither of us.
I should sleep. Tomorrow will be busy - the wardrobe, the staff meetings, the beginning of a year that will feel like ten. But every time I close my eyes, I see that pen skipping across my signature. That little scar in the first letter of my name.
A knock at the door.
Not the connecting door - the one to the hallway. I sit up, pulling the blanket around my shoulders.
“Come in.”
It’s not Callum. It’s Olivia, in her nightgown, rabbit under her arm, eyes still heavy with almost-sleep.
“I heard people talking,” she says. “Downstairs. They said you married my daddy.”
“They did?”
“Is it true?”
I could lie. I could tell her it’s complicated, or grown-ups sometimes do things that are hard to explain, or any of the careful non-answers adults use when they don’t want to deal with children’s questions.
But I’m so tired of lying. I’ve been lying since before I walked into this house, and I’m going to be lying for a whole year more, and just this once I want to say something that’s at least adjacent to true.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s true.”
Olivia considers this. Her face does that serious thing it does when she’s working through a problem too big for her small body.
“So you’re staying,” she says.
“For a while.”
“That’s what you said before.”
“I know.”
She climbs up onto the bed beside me, settling in like she belongs there, like she’s always belonged there. The rabbit goes on the pillow. Her head goes against my shoulder. Her small hand finds mine.
“Are you my new mommy now?”
The question lands somewhere deep in my chest, somewhere I’ve been protecting, somewhere that’s been locked up and sealed off and marked with signs that say do not enter. I feel it crack open. I feel something start to leak.
I cannot speak.
I cannot answer her, because the truth is too complicated and the lie would hurt too much, so I just sit there in the dark with my hand in hers and no words for any of it.
“It’s okay if you don’t know yet,” Olivia says, very seriously. “I didn’t know if I liked broccoli at first. Sometimes you have to think about things.”
A laugh bubbles up from somewhere, wet and ragged. “Yeah. Sometimes you do.”
“I already know, though.” She yawns, burrowing deeper into my side. “I already decided.”
“Decided what?”
“That you’re staying. Forever. Not just a while.” Her eyes are closing, her voice going fuzzy at the edges. “So you might as well be my mommy. Since you’re going to be here anyway.”
She’s asleep before I can respond. Her breathing evens out against my shoulder, slow and trusting, the breathing of a child who has no idea what the adults around her are doing.
I sit there in the dark, not moving, barely breathing myself.
I am married to a man I don’t love.
I am lying to a child who trusts me.
I am wearing a ring that cost more than my mother’s funeral.
And somewhere in this house, in the room on the other side of a locked door, a man is probably lying awake too, both of us staring at our respective ceilings, both of us wondering what the hell we’ve gotten ourselves into.
I’m still sitting there, Olivia warm against my side, when the connecting door opens.
Callum stands in the doorway, backlit by the lamp in his room. He’s not coming in. He’s just standing there, looking at us - at his daughter asleep against his wife, at the tableau we make in the dark.
“She asked me the same thing,” he says quietly. “Before she came to find you.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I didn’t know what to tell her.” He runs a hand through his hair, and for a second he looks as lost as I feel. “I still don’t.”
We look at each other across the dark room, across the sleeping child, across everything we’ve agreed to and everything we haven’t.
“One year,” I say.
“One year,” he agrees.
And neither of us sounds like we believe it.