“It is true,” she says. “But there is another thing I wanted to speak to you about.”
“Ah, yes, two things. What is the second?”
She rises from the bed, padding across the room to a small desk in the corner. I watch as she opens the drawer and draws out a few sheets of paper.
“These are our marriage articles,” she says. “With all the little traps I sewed up for you.”
I had forgotten all about the marriage articles.
“I don’t remember many traps.”
“Because you are too good. But I made you change your name. I made you promise to be faithful. I gave you pin money and no right to anything I own until after my death.”
“All stipulations I was happy to agree to,” I say. A strange sense of anxiety beats down on me as I see the documents in her hand.
“But they weren’t fair, Alfred. I forced you. You didn’t deserve it. It has bothered me all day. I realized it when Veronica spoke to you in the way that I once did. I realized how wrong it was. How wrong she,I,was about you. I want to make itright.”
“Annabelle,” I say, feeling a strange edge of panic. “That is not necessary.”
“It is. These articles—they should become null and void.”
Then she takes the sheets between her hands and rips them to pieces.
Instantly, my heart constricts.
“Annabelle,” I hear myself shout. “Don’t.”
But it is too late. And the foundations of my marriage lay scattered on the floor.
“Don’t you see, Alfred? We can renegotiate. We can make it fair.”
I step towards her. I am not even thinking. I hate that she has destroyed one of the documents that binds me to her. Thatmademe hers so definitively.
When I reach her, I spin her so that her back is to me so that I can whisper in her ear.
“No, Annabelle. I don’t want it to be fair. I am going to show you, Annabelle, how much I want what was in those papers.”
“Alfred!”
I turn her around.
For the first time all night, I have lost sight of her condition, of my fear of using her too harshly. I am too stuck on the way she just decimated the agreement I made with my whole heart. “Get on the bed, Annabelle.”
She crosses her arms.
“No, you are being ridiculous, I amtryingto make things fair between us?—”
“On the bed—or I will put you there.”
She doesn’t move.
I advance on her.
I strip her thin night rail from her shoulders.
“Alfred,” she objects, “You are mad.”
Her skin pimples in the cold air of the room. It is nearly winter and the fire in the grate is low. But I don’t care.
