Chapter 22
the name on the passport
LEXI
Getting the passport was astonishingly easy, and I felt really bad about that.
The security guys drove us to the official passport office.
One clerk was waiting inside, holding an iced coffee and swaying on her feet.
She was a nice lady in maybe her forties, who gave me the form to fill out, which I did.
She reviewed our paperwork while she side-eyed me, probably trying to figure out who the heck I was to cause a series of phone calls that got her out of bed in the middle of a very dark Sunday night to make a brand-new passport for some chick who inexplicably didn’t have one.
When she asked me for a two-inch by two-inch picture, I think my eyes blew up like party balloons, and she sighed, shook her head, and retrieved a camera from under the counter.
I didn’t know they had a camera. I thought you had to bring a picture, but she had a big camera and snapped a shot of me anyway.
And then she asked me which name I wanted her to put on the passport.
Because the marriage license was the halfway-unofficial one that didn’t have the county's holographic seal, she said I could pick which name I wanted on my passport.
I paused.
Looking back, I kind of regret that pause.
Nicolai took a half-step back, removing himself so he wasn’t pressuring me.
That’s what actually made my decision.
In Jimmy’s family, at Jimmy’s church, the sermons were always about what I had to do, what it was my obligation to do, what I must do for everyone else. His family spoke in the imperative.
Do this.
Be this.
Change yourself to be what we want.
Nicolai’s backward half step allowed me to breathe and decide who I wanted to be.
“Alexandra Faith Romanov,” I told her.
And so that was the name the clerk typed into the computer for the passport.
After that, she told us we could come back in an hour because the machine had to laminate the passport, so we just sat in the car outside and talked.
“So, that woman who was sucking on your face,” I started.
Nicolai winced. “That was Alina Volkov. It was a sneak attack.”
“Yeah, as I was dodging my way across the ballroom, I saw the look on your face. I didn’t know you could do disgust quite like that. I thought you were going to puke on her.”
“Oh, surely I kept it quieter than that,” he said, one dark eyebrow lowering.
“Maybe it’s just because I know you better.”
“Now I am concerned that I should watch my facial expressions in public. Surely I didn’t make a show of it.”
His look of worry was so cute that I hugged him. When I’d seen him wipe his mouth on his sleeve and shove Alina out to an arm’s length, I’d figured out whose bright idea that kiss was.
Less than an hour later, the clerk handed me my official US passport through the SUV's window and staggered back to her own car to drive away.
“To the airport,” Nicolai said to Ueli in the front of the car. “The plane should be ready to fly soon.”
And I held my very own brand-new passport in my hands.
I opened it.
Alexandra Faith Romanov.
I didn’t feel like I had subsumed my identity.
I felt like I had chosen who I wanted to be, and I wanted to be with Nicolai.
Even if it was only for a year.
The dashboard clock read that it was almost two o’clock in the morning.
Only three hundred sixty-three more days to go.