The Husband Clause

Chapter 10

Christian’s POV

Six minutes to spare, which is either good planning or luck, and I have learned over thirty years not to distinguish too carefully between the two.

The registrar's office smells like carpet cleaner and bureaucratic resignation. A woman behind the desk confirms our names and hands us a form.

She does not ask anything that is not on the form, which I appreciate, because I am not certain I could answer anything that is not on the form right now with any reliability.

She witnesses our signatures with the expression of someone who has witnessed a great many signatures and draws no conclusions from any of them.

The whole thing takes eleven minutes.

Cassie signs as our witness, shakes both our hands, says she will file the certificate tonight and call in the morning, and leaves. I watch her go and think: the most significant thing I have done in thirty years and it took less time than a dental appointment.

We stand on the pavement outside the building. The city carries on around us with complete indifference.

Emily has her collar up and is looking at the middle distance the way she does when she is processing something she has not finished processing yet, and I cross the road and buy two coffees from the stand there because standing doing nothing felt worse than having something to do with my hands.

She takes hers without looking at me. Wraps both hands around it.

She is my wife.

I have been turning that word over for twenty years. Not continuously — I am not a man who tortures himself, or I have learned not to be, which amounts to the same thing at a certain point.

But the word has always been there in the background of everything, the way a sound is still present even when you have stopped consciously hearing it. It is strange to have it be simply true. The actual version of a thing you have imagined many times never quite fits the shape you made for it.

I drink my coffee and she drinks hers and neither of us says anything, and I think: this is already different from how I imagined it. Better in some ways. The imagined version did not include her this tired, or this brave, or the particular way she holds a paper cup like it is the only warm thing available.

"Right," she says, eventually.

"Right," I say.

I drive us to the house. I show her the room — the wardrobe I cleared two days ago when I decided to believe this was actually going to happen, the shelf in the bathroom, the window that gets the morning light. She has one bag. She sets it on the bed and looks around.

"It's a good room," she says.

"It gets the morning light," I say, which I already told her, and she does not point this out.

I make dinner because she has not eaten since the restaurant and I am not letting that continue. Nothing complicated — pasta, whatever is in the fridge, the kind of meal that exists to be eaten rather than noticed.

She comes into the kitchen while I am finishing it and sits at the table and looks at the food with the expression of someone who has forgotten they have a body.

"You don't have to feed me," she says.

"I'm aware." I put a bowl in front of her. "Eat anyway."

She picks up the fork. After a moment: "This is good."

"You sound surprised."

"I didn't know you could cook."

"There are thirty years of things you don't know about me," I say. "We have time."

She looks at me over the bowl with an expression I cannot fully read, and then looks back down at the food.

I make a note to stop buying the kind of bread that gets stale in two days and buy the kind that lasts a week, because she is going to be here a week, longer, and those are the details that matter now — the bread, the shelf in the bathroom, the particular things she takes in her coffee.

The small architecture of a shared life, which I am going to build carefully and without making it a moment, because making things moments with Emily tends to make her retreat.

She is nearly finished eating when she turns to me with the particular expression she gets when a decision has been made somewhere behind her eyes before she has quite finished making it. "I want to go to the hospital tonight. Before visiting hours close."

I check the time. We have just under an hour. "I'll drive you."

"You don't have to—"

"Emily." I say it the same way I have been saying it since the hospital corridor, which is: I am not going to argue about this with you. "Get your coat."

She gets her coat.

At the hospital I park and walk her to the entrance and she stops at the doors.

"You can wait in the car," she says.

"I know," I say, and follow her inside anyway. I find a chair in the waiting area and sit with my phone and the particular quality of a hospital corridor at nine in the evening, which is: all the noise happening somewhere else, filtered down to a low hum by the time it reaches you.

Forty minutes. When she comes back through the corridor doors she looks lighter — not repaired, nothing is repaired yet, but the specific lightness of someone who has confirmed that the thing they were most afraid of has not happened.

In the car she sits for a moment before she speaks.

"She lectured me," she says. "For six minutes. About how I should have told her sooner what was happening because she is twelve not four and she can handle it." A pause, something unsteady at the edge of it. "She timed herself. She told me she timed herself."

I look at her. "She timed herself."

"On her phone." Emily presses the back of her hand to her mouth for a second. "She's fine. She's completely fine."

"She is," I say.

She looks out the window. I drive and I think about the motion that arrived while we were eating and that I have not told her about yet.

I wait until we are nearly home — until the streets are familiar and she is a little more settled and the hospital is behind us rather than in front.

"Daniel's lawyers filed a challenge this evening," I say. "While we were at dinner."

She goes very still in the passenger seat. "What kind?"

"Contesting the marriage. Manufactured to circumvent the conditions." I keep my voice even, because her going still like that requires someone in the car to be even. "Cassie will answer it tomorrow. It will not succeed."

A pause. Outside the window the streetlights pass at regular intervals and she watches them.

"Does Cassie need me?"

"Tomorrow. Tonight you don't have to do anything."

She nods once and does not say anything else for the rest of the drive. She does not say thank you, and I am glad she doesn't, because thank you would mean this is a transaction and it has never been that, not since the fire escape, not once, not ever — she just has not entirely understood that yet, and I have twenty years of practice at patience and I am not in any hurry.

I park. She gets out of the car. I watch her go inside.

I sit in the car for a moment in the quiet and think: she is twelve feet away and the distance I kept for twenty years is gone, and I do not know yet what that makes possible.

But I intend to find out.