CHAPTER 6 #2
“Efficient.” Her pen ticked. “Four. Public appearances and staged photographs. Define staged.”
“Standing next to each other in clean shirts while somebody from a magazine says 'natural.'”
“I've posed for worse.” Tick. “Five. No questions about Fieldstone operations I can't photograph. Define can't photograph.”
“If a client's face is in it, it never existed. Anything else, ask me straight. Worst I'll ever tell you is no. I won't lie to you.”
She sat back into the lamplight, dark eyes fixed on mine. “That goes in,” she said, and wrote in the margin, reading aloud as she went: “Five-a. The party of the first part does not lie to the party of the second. Sign.”
I signed.
She hit a line that curled her lip. ““The Ansari materials shall be domiciled at the principal residence.” I'm a person with materials, Sergeant. Your lawyer writes like a subpoena.”
“He bills like one too. Sorry — that's all Pryce. Strike it, write it human. He can cry into his retainer.”
That won a short breath of a laugh, no more than a syllable.
I flipped to the next page and told her the rest before it could turn into a briefing.
“Logistics, while I have you. Pryce sets the license moving tonight.
The courthouse gives us a slot at eleven, day after tomorrow.
Rings, a witness, ten minutes of state-issued vocabulary.
Past that I'm guessing. I've planned three hundred extractions and I don't know what a wedding actually needs. If there are supposed to be flowers, somebody has to tell me about the flowers.”
“No flowers.” She said it like triage of her own. “Rings, a witness, and a working smoke detector. I've had enough open flame this week.”
“The courthouse is limestone. Best I could do.”
“See, that's why I'm marrying you. Fireproofing.”
We traded pages faster after that, striking Pryce's chill out of the language line by line. Somewhere past page nine it stopped feeling like paperwork. I added a clause of my own while she watched: Clause six — the dog remains a free agent.
“He'll sleep where he decides to sleep,” I said. “I've never won that negotiation and I've quit funding it.”
“He can have my vote too.”
Then she drew a neat line under my clause six and wrote in the margin, unhurried, and slid the page across with the pen on top of it, her face as composed as the document.
“Clause seven,” she said. “No falling in love. Initial here.”
I initialed it without blinking. CW, block letters, square against her line.
Easiest initials of my life. That should have been the tell.
“You didn't even read the fine print,” she said, taking the page back.
“A man should hesitate somewhere in a marriage contract. I hesitated at clause four. Clean shirts.”
She laughed — the first whole one I'd gotten out of her, quick and low, finished too soon — and while I was busy congratulating myself she twisted all that black hair up and stabbed my pen straight through the knot of it.
“That's my good pen.”
“It's clause eight now.”
Half past three, I took her down the creek path, because a person ought to know the ground they're marrying into. You hear the water before the path shows it to you, and the cottonwoods were letting their seed go all along the bank, white drift wandering loose over the current.
Where the bank lifts above the waterline, the stacks stand: fieldstones fitted into cairns, waist-high and lower, weathered gray, moss socketed deep into the seams. Boys' work. Still standing.
She looked from the stones to me. The camera stayed down against her ribs.
I steadied my breathing. “My brother and I built those.”
The water kept on under the sentence. My thumb hooked the chain under my collar, the small teeth of the tags through cotton — a habit seven years old, and I didn't fight it.
“They've held,” she said.
That was all. She gave them the kind of attention people usually save for graves — presence, no shutter — then walked on beside me, close enough that our shadows overlapped, and left the rest of it mine.
I'd braced on instinct, hands ready over a wound that never fully closes. She just let it be. A man could get used to being handled that carefully.
I made a note not to.
The note didn't take.
By five the light had gone long and gold, and Wes came down the loft stairs carrying the drive like a baby bird. Solid-state, imaged, encrypted, sealed in an anti-static bag, evidence tape over the seam, the seal number in his tidy print.
The vault sits at the foot of those stairs — a squat fire-rated cube bought at a bank auction, bolted through the planking into timber older than the county road. Deeds, patents, and now this. I opened the chain-of-custody log: a bound logbook, first page blank until tonight.
Item. Seal number. Date, time.
Every hand it passed through.
Wes signed as the one who made the copy. I signed as the one who sealed it. Vera signed under us both — V.
Ansari, the V like a check mark — and if her pen slowed over the line, it showed nowhere else.