15. Cali
CALI
The City Clerk's office isn't what I pictured.
I don't know what I pictured, actually. A courtroom, maybe.
Something with wood paneling and a stern man in a robe.
Instead, it's a boring conference room with beige walls and fake flowers in a plastic vase on a metal desk, and a line of couples out in the hallway waiting their turn, some of them dressed up, some of them in jeans.
I wore the green dress, the one from that first date at the restaurant in the West Village.
I told myself it was because it's the nicest thing I own that isn't a gown, and a gown would be ridiculous for a courthouse.
Not because Ronan told me once, back then, that I looked dangerous in it. Certainly not that.
Ronan's in a dark suit. No tie. He looks too good to be real, probably because he is.
Hayden stands beside me in a button-up shirt I made him tuck in.
He's got his serious face on. When I explained to the kids what was happening, he asked a lot of questions—is this real, is it forever, does this mean Ronan is our dad now—and I answered the ones I could and dodged the ones I couldn't. He's decided his job is to be the witness.
He keeps announcing that job title to anyone who will listen. I'm the witness!
Isabella is holding Doctor Fuzz's shoebox. The caterpillar became a chrysalis two days ago. She won't let it out of her sight, so it came to the wedding. She's got it clutched to her chest like a bouquet, and since I'm the one who doesn't have flowers, she's the more prepared of the two of us.
"Are you nervous, Mommy?" she asks.
"A little."
"Don't be. Mr. Ronan's not scary."
I look up. Ronan's heard it. His jaw twitches, and he crouches down to her level right there in the beige room.
"That's right," he says. "And even if I were, I'd never be scary to you. Or to your mom."
"I know." She says it like he's dumb for even suggesting otherwise. "Doctor Fuzz knows, too."
The clerk calls our names. Meadows. Akov.
We file in and stand where we're supposed to stand. Shoulders squared, just like he coached me. Hayden takes his post at the end, while Isabella sits in a plastic chair and holds the box in her lap.
The officiant is a tired woman with reading glasses on a chain. She must've done this ten thousand times, and that's just today. She runs through the mumbo-jumbo exactly like Ronan said she would, though I don't hear most of it because of the sudden-onset, emotionally-induced tinnitus in my ears.
This is paper. This is a fire drill. This is business.
Then it's the part where we speak.
"Do you have your own vows," the woman asks, "or would you like to repeat after me?"
I open my mouth to say repeat after me. That's the plan. That's what's safe.
But Ronan says, "I have something."
I whip my head around. That was not the plan. We didn't rehearse that. We rehearsed standing and looking and the kiss, God help me, but we never once talked about him saying his own—
He takes my hands. Both of them. Palms up first, offering, then closing around mine when I put them there on numb autopilot.
He looks at me. Not at the room. At me.
"I'm not a good man," he says. "You know that. You've got the receipts."
The tired officiant blinks. This is not the courthouse standard, to say the least.
"I've spent my whole life taking things," Ronan goes on.
"Deciding what people got to have. I did it to you, and I was wrong every single time.
I know that now, even if I figured it out too late.
" His thumb brushes once across my knuckle.
"But I'm not taking this. You're giving it.
That's the only reason I get to stand here at all. "
I can't breathe. This is not a fire drill. This is just a fire, period.
"I'll spend whatever I've got left keeping you safe," he swears.
"You and Hayden and Isabella. Whether you want me to or not.
" His voice drops so low I feel it more than hear it.
"This isn't a lie. It's the truth, said out loud, in front of one officiant, two children, and a caterpillar in a shoebox.”
Isabella whispers, loud enough for the whole room, "Doctor Fuzz says yes."
A couple people in the hallway laugh softly. I don't. I can't. My eyes are burning and I'm furious about it, because I said no crying, I said no romance, I said this is a paper thing, and the man just went and meant every word with his whole damn chest.
There's not an ounce of liar in him. There never has been, not when it comes to this.
The officiant clears her throat and turns to me. "And you?"
"I—" I start.
And it comes out wrong. It comes out thick and cracked and completely, humiliatingly full of feeling.
"I said I hated you," I tell him. "I've said it a hundred times. I said it to a federal agent in my own foyer."
His mouth twitches. "You did."
"She didn't believe me." I laugh. "I didn't believe me, either.
" I squeeze his hands, hard, harder than gripping-isn't-in-the-deal allows, but I don't care, because the deal is dead, everything is on fire.
"You took my mirrors so I couldn't make myself small.
You got down on the floor and said goodnight to a caterpillar and you meant it.
So I'm not going to stand here and say a flat little line," I finish.
"Just… yes. Okay? Yes. This. Whatever this is. Yes."
The officiant looks between us, over her glasses, like she's decided this is above her pay grade. Then she does her job.
"By the power vested in me by the City of New York," she says, "I now pronounce you married. You may—"
I don't wait for her to finish.
I go up on my toes and kiss him, and this time, there's no rehearsal about it. His hands come up to frame my face, careful, still asking even now, and I answer by fisting the front of his shirt and pulling him down into it. Hayden makes a disgusted noise. Isabella cheers.
When I pull back, Ronan looks like a man who's been hit by something large and moving fast and doesn't mind at all.
"For the record," I whisper against his mouth, "I still don't know what we are."
"We'll figure it out. We've got time now."
Hayden marches up. "Do I sign something? I'm the witness."
"You do," Ronan tells him, dead serious. "Right here. Your best signature."
Hayden signs with his tongue stuck out in concentration. Isabella insists Doctor Fuzz gets to sign too, so Ronan holds the pen and makes a tiny scribble in the corner while she directs him how the caterpillar wants it done.
Then it's over. Signed. Sealed.
Except it doesn't feel that simple. It feels like the earth moved under me.
I think I might love him after all, I told myself, weeks ago.
I'm not going to say it out loud yet, because I have some pride left and a divorce that finalized about a week ago, but I know. I've assembled the data. That's the one thing I've always been good at.
We walk out into the daylight, the four of us. Isabella's telling Hayden that she's going to be a flower girl next time even though there won't be a next time, and Hayden's explaining that you can't have a next time if the first time worked, and I'm laughing at both of them—
And there she is.
The exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time.
Agent Gia Mercer is leaning against the stone rail at the bottom of the steps, arms crossed, gray blazer, sunglasses pushed up on her head. She's got a scowl on her face that could curdle milk.
Ronan's arm moves, just slightly, and I realize he's putting himself a half step in front of me.
"Congratulations," Mercer says, though she clearly does not mean it. "Beautiful ceremony, I'm sure."
"Agent Mercer," Ronan intones. "You didn't RSVP."
"Funny." She pushes off the rail. Her eyes flick to the kids, then back to me. "Take the children to the car," she says to Ronan. "This is a grown-up conversation."
"They stay with me," Ronan growls.
"Hm." Mercer looks at me instead. "Ms. Meadows. Or is it Mrs. Akov now?"
"None of your concern, I'm afraid."
She exhales through her nose. "You know what you just did in there? You want me to say it out loud in front of the kids, or you want to be smart about it?"
I turn from her. "Hayden, take your sister to look at the pigeons over there. Stay where I can see you."
Hayden, sensing something, herds Isabella toward the birds. She goes, but she keeps looking back, the box clutched to her chest.
Mercer waits until they're a few feet off. Then she turns the full weight of that stare on me.
"Spousal privilege," she says flatly. "That's what that was.
You marry him, I can't compel you to testify.
I can't touch anything you two say to each other now.
My single best witness just walked into a clerk's office and made herself useless to me.
On purpose." Her jaw flexes. "That's cute. That's real cute. Whose idea was it?"
"Mine," Ronan and I say at the same time.
She looks between us. "Right."
"You're the one who gave me my choices," I remind her. "Victim or criminal."
"That's right. Your only two choices."
"No." I lift my chin. "There was a third one. I just had to build it myself." I hold her eyes. "I'm real good at building things nobody else sees."
More tension ripples across her face. "You think you've won," she says, "but a piece of paper won't keep you safe from what's coming.
" She jerks her chin at Ronan without looking at him.
"He is who he is. And I am who I am. I've spent fifteen years exposing rot, and you two won't be any different.
It'll take me longer. That's all a privilege wall does.
It buys time." She leans in. "So enjoy your honeymoon. I'll see both of you again."
With that, she vanishes once again into the ether.
Ronan watches the corner she whisked around for a long moment. His face has gone somewhere cold, somewhere I don't like.
"She's good," he growls.
"That's what I'm worried about."
"She's not wrong, either. This buys time. It doesn't end the whole affair."
I turn to face him fully. "But we've got time now. You said so yourself. In there."
He looks down at me, ready to say something else. But before he can, Hayden hollers from the pigeons. "Mom! Can we go? Isabella's trying to catch one and it's not going great!"
Isabella is, in fact, chasing a very unbothered pigeon in a slow circle, the box tucked under one arm, offering the bird a formal medical consultation. The pigeon is not interested.
"Yeah," I call. "We can go."
Ronan holds out his hand. I look at it. The scarred knuckles. The old tattoos. The hand that shot a man on my stairs and made pancakes with Minnie Mouse ears and clasped an octopus charm around my wrist and never, not once, laid a finger on me that I didn't ask for.
I put mine in it.
"Take us home, Mr. Akov," I say.
His fingers close around mine, careful, then sure. "As you wish, Mrs.—" He stops himself. His mouth tips up at the corner. "Ms. Meadows."
"Mhmm. That's what I thought you were going to say."
But I'm smiling when I say it, and he knows it, and I let him see it, because we've got time now, and I'm done making myself small in front of a man who only ever wanted me big.
We gather the kids and the caterpillar and we go.