Chapter 5
Marisol
The arrangement was working too well, and that was the whole disaster of it.
My visa was processing, clean and on track.
My life was intact — same clinic, same kids, same corner booth at the Sunrise Diner.
Eli was thriving; he'd added six new words that month and a deeply held opinion that turtles were the superior animal.
By every external measure, the plan had worked perfectly.
The only flaw in the plan was that I had fallen completely, hopelessly, catastrophically in love with my convenient husband and his borrowed son, and I was the one who'd signed the paper saying I wouldn't.
That's the thing nobody warns you about a marriage of convenience.
You expect the awkwardness. You don't expect the bedtime stories.
You don't expect to watch a man teach a three-year-old to skip stones at a creek, both of them crouched at the water's edge, the big rough hands guiding the small clumsy ones, and feel your entire chest cave in with something that has no business being there.
That's where it got me. The creek. A Saturday, late afternoon, the spring light going gold, and Beckett taking Eli down to the water to teach him to skip stones — which a three-year-old absolutely cannot do, the rocks just go plunk, every time, plunk plunk plunk, and Beckett kept saying "good throw, bud, real good" like each plunk was a triumph, and Eli kept believing him, and I sat on the bank and watched this enormous patient man celebrate a dozen consecutive failures like they were victories, and I thought:
This is it. This is the family I didn't know I was allowed to want.
I'd spent six years building a life that was good and full and entirely mine, and I'd told myself it was enough, the kids and the clinic and the friends, because the other thing — the family thing, the someone-to-come-home-to thing — wasn't on offer for a woman who worked fifty hours a week and tutored toddlers on Thursdays.
I'd folded that want up small and put it somewhere I didn't look.
And now it was sitting at a creek throwing rocks, and it had a beard and a three-year-old, and it was legally my husband, and I wasn't allowed to have it.
"Mari! Mari, did you SEE, I skipped it!"
"I saw, peque! It went so far!" It went plunk. It went directly down.
"Beckett said I'm the best skipper."
"You are the best skipper," Beckett confirmed, straight-faced, and caught my eye over the kid's head, and there was a warmth in his look that undid me a little more, and I had to glance away at the water before my face did the thing my face does.
The thing my face does. He'd know. He notices everything, it's the job.
That was the danger. I couldn't hide it.
I'd promised him full honesty and I was keeping a secret the size of a mountain, and every day it got harder to keep, because every day I loved them more, and every day he'd do some small unbearable thing — fall asleep on the couch with Eli on his chest, both of them snoring; leave me the last of the coffee without mentioning it; say "drive safe" in that low voice every single morning like it mattered whether I came home — and the secret would press against my ribs and I'd have to hold my breath until it passed.
The girls saw it before I admitted it to myself. Of course they did.
Girls' night was at Nadia's, since she was too pregnant to go anywhere, and it was the whole crew — Wren, Briar, Gemma, Ivy, Nora, Nadia presiding from the good armchair like a very glowing queen.
There was wine for them and sparkling water for Nadia and a charcuterie board that Wren had made and was unreasonably proud of.
I was three sips into a glass of wine when Briar set down her drink, looked at me, and said, "Okay. You've got the look."
"What look?"
"The look." Briar gestured at my entire face. "Don't play dumb, cousin." She'd started calling me cousin the day I married Beckett and had not stopped, and I'd given up correcting the genealogy because honestly I loved it. "I know that look. I invented that look."
"I don't know what you're—"
"The 'I married him for a completely practical reason and now I am wildly, embarrassingly in love with him' look," Wren said, popping a piece of cheese in her mouth. "We've all worn it. It's the house look. There should be a plaque."
"I have not—"
"Mari." Nadia raised her sparkling water from the armchair, beaming. "Sweetheart. You hummed when you talked about him just now. You said 'Beckett took Eli to the creek' and you hummed."
"I did not hum."
"You hummed," said five women in unison, and Gemma added, "and your face did the thing, the thing it does, the tell, you've got a tell, it's all over your face right now, you're doing it."
I put my face in my hands. The room erupted in the warm vicious laughter of women who love you and have caught you dead to rights.
"It's not — it's complicated," I said, into my hands. "We have an arrangement. There are terms. Separate rooms. No expectations. I signed a contract, you guys, a literal piece of paper, and the deal was that it stays practical, and I'm — I'm not allowed to—"
"Oh, honey." Ivy, who I should mention had drafted the actual paperwork and was therefore the foremost living authority on its terms, set down her wine and gave me a look of profound lawyerly sympathy.
"There's no clause about feelings. I checked.
I wrote it. You're not in breach. Feelings are not actionable. "
"That's not the point. The point is he signed it too, and he meant the practical version, and if I — if I make it weird, if I want more than the deal, I could ruin everything.
He could feel trapped. Or like I tricked him.
Or — he's been left by everyone he ever loved, did you know that?
His parents, his sister, everyone, they all left without warning, and the one thing he asked me for was honesty and not disappearing, and if I tell him I've fallen for him and it blows up the whole thing, then I'm just one more person who—"
I stopped. Because the room had gone quiet, the soft quiet of women who'd just watched you say the real thing out loud without meaning to.
"Mari," Wren said gently. "Have you considered that he might feel exactly the same way?"
"He doesn't. He's — he's so careful. He keeps to his side.
He gets up at dawn and splits firewood for hours, in spring, we have enough wood to heat the cabin until I'm fifty, he just — he keeps his distance like he promised, like a man of his word, because that's what he is, he's a man of his word, and that's exactly why I can't—"
"Honey." Nadia again, gentle from her throne. "Why do you think a man splits firewood he doesn't need at dawn?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
"To get a longing out of his body before anyone wakes up," Briar said quietly. "Silas used to chop a lot of wood, too. Before. It's a whole thing with these men. They've got all this feeling and nowhere to put it, so they put it in an axe."
I sat there with my wine and a heart going too fast.
"To convenient marriages," Nadia announced, raising her sparkling water, breaking the moment with mercy, "that stopped being convenient. The finest kind. The only kind worth a damn."
"To convenient marriages," everyone echoed, and I drank to it, and I was blushing so hard I could feel it in my ears, and underneath the blush was a small terrible flicker of something I was trying very hard not to call hope.
He split wood he didn't need.
I'd noticed. I'd noticed and I hadn't let myself wonder why.
I came home from girls' night to find Beckett asleep on the couch with Eli sprawled across his chest, the dinosaur book tented open on the floor where it had fallen, the lamp still on.
The babysitter — Wren's niece — had texted that they'd "passed out mid-T-rex.
" Both of them out cold, the big one and the small one, mouths open, identically dead to the world.
I stood in the doorway and looked at them for a long time.
Then I picked up the book, turned off the lamp, draped the throw blanket over both of them because moving Eli would wake them both and they were so peaceful, and I went to bed alone in my separate room, which had never felt more like a technicality, and I lay awake thinking about firewood.
The interview notice came on a Tuesday.
It was an official envelope, the kind that makes my stomach drop now on reflex, and Beckett brought it in from the mailbox and handed it to me with a careful face, watching me open it.
"It's the marriage interview," I said, scanning it. "Standard procedure. They want to verify the marriage is — genuine. They schedule a home visit. An officer comes, separates us sometimes, asks questions, checks that we're a real couple and not just — you know. Paper."
Beckett was quiet.
"Three weeks," I said. "We have three weeks to prepare."
"Prepare how?"
"They ask everything. What side of the bed you sleep on, what I take in my coffee, the story of how we got together, your childhood, my childhood, what we argue about, what we did last weekend.
They're trained to catch couples who don't actually know each other.
We have to know everything about each other.
Convincingly. We have to be able to sit in front of a federal agent and prove we're—" I stopped.
"In love," Beckett finished. Quiet. Not looking at me.
"In love," I said. "Yeah."
The cabin was very quiet. Eli was at the table eating apple slices and narrating a war between two dinosaurs, oblivious.
"Okay," Beckett said finally. His voice was even, careful, the voice he uses when he's holding something steady. "Then we prep. We do it right. Whatever they need from us, we — we'll know each other inside and out. We'll pass."
"It would help," I said, and I don't know where the courage came from, except that I'd had two glasses of wine three hours ago and a roomful of women had told me to look at the firewood, "if it weren't entirely an act."
He looked at me then. Sharp. Those sun-creased eyes finding mine and holding.
For a second — one second — the whole careful thing between us wobbled, like it might tip over, like the paper might tear.
Then Eli yelled "the triceratops is WINNING" and knocked over his apple slices, and the moment shattered, and Beckett went to clean it up, and I stood there with a federal envelope in my hand and a heart in my throat and three weeks to convince a stranger of a thing I was terrified to say out loud to the only person who mattered.
It would have been so much easier, I thought, if we weren't both secretly, separately, exactly what they were sending someone to check for.
Real.
It was real.
I just didn't know yet that he knew it too.