“Go,” she said.
“I’ll come back tonight.”
Ellie opened her mouth as if to protest, then seemed to think better of it. Something shifted in her eyes. She nodded. “Okay.”
I said my goodbyes to Gus, who shook my hand with more strength than a man with a week to live probably should have had, which I filed away without examining, and told me not to do anything stupid at work, which was as close as he generally got to I love you, be careful.
I leaned down and kissed Ellie’s cheek because Gus was watching and because apparently I was doing that now. She turned her face toward it in a way she probably didn’t notice she was doing, and her fingers found my sleeve and held on for a moment before she let go.
“Be careful,” she whispered.
“Always,” I promised.
In the elevator, I leaned against the back wall and stared at the ceiling and thought about many seconds that had been supposed to be three.
Brief, I told myself. Appropriate to the circumstances. A logistical necessity.
The elevator opened. I walked out into the thin October afternoon and didn’t think about it at all.
I was completely convincing, mostly to everyone except myself.
SEVEN
ELLIE
Two days after my wedding, I was still married.
A temporary condition, technically. I’d tucked the license in my purse after the ceremony with every intention of dealing with it. But it wasn’t done yet, partly because something always seemed more pressing and partly because every time my hand brushed against the envelope I remembered the warmth of Daniel’s mouth and lost the thread of whatever I’d been doing. I’d handle it. The safest thing would be to shred it, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do that yet. What if this was the last thing Grandpa ever signed? Most importantly, it was still unfiled, which meant the whole situation remained theoretical and reversible, and not a thing I needed to examine too closely.
That was my story, and I was sticking to it.
I’d been at the hospital as much as I could manage. Patrice Wembley, who’d worked at Granger Hardware for fifteen years before her retirement and who showed up like a force of nature whenever the situation called for it, had taken over the store without being asked, arriving Monday morning with her reading glasses on her head, her keys already in hand, and a scowl that dared anyone to suggest she needed instructions. I’d shown upto open and found her already there, the register counted and the signage turned, waving me away with the authority of a woman who had outlasted three recessions and knew exactly what she was doing.
I owed Patrice Wembley a very large fruit basket and possibly my firstborn.
By Tuesday afternoon, Grandpa wasn’t struggling with his sudoku as much as he had on the first day after the stroke, when the pencil had jerked across the page, his brow furrowed with the effort of fighting his own synapses for every number. His speech was still a little thick on one side, and he didn’t want to admit he tired more quickly. But his eyes were clear and sharp, focused on the puzzle with the impatience of a man who never did anything halfway.
He’d improved. Not not miraculous, but better, and I held onto that with both hands.
I sat in the chair by the window, watching him and thinking about the kiss.
Specifically, about the part where Daniel’s arms slid around me and drew me in closer. Not part of our hastily conceived plan. Not at all. I’d been close to him before. We were friends. We’d been hugging for years with the easy familiarity that didn’t require any thought. But this was different. This was body to body, chest to chest, mouth to delicious, devastating, warm mouth. He’d been so solid, close enough that the ridges of muscle beneath his clothes imprinted on my palms. I’d absorbed the steadiness of him, the sheer physical fact of him, in a way that short-circuited something essential in my brain. And that mouth. Lord, have mercy, the man could kiss. We’d been friends forever, and I knew he wasn’t a monk, though the details of his romantic life were somewhere we had, by some unspoken mutual agreement, never ventured. But clearly he’d had enoughexperience in his life to have honed his craft considerably in that particular department.
I wanted to do it again.
No matter how many times I talked myself around it and back and around it again, that was the conclusion I came to every time. Stripped of all the context and the circumstances and the extremely compelling case I kept constructing for why it meant nothing, what remained was a simple, inconvenient, and extremely loud truth: I wanted to kiss my best friend again. My fake husband. The man I’d married in a hospital room as part of a scheme to make my dying grandfather happy. Except that the license sat in my purse, and the officiant had been perfectly official, and nothing about that kiss felt fake, and?—
None of it mattered because this was a performance. A two-person play, staged for an audience of one. The moment that audience no longer needed it, the curtain would come down, and we’d go back to being what we’d always been, which was the most important thing either of us had. I wouldn’t blow that up over a kiss that ran approximately ten seconds longer than planned and fried my brain circuits.
The ring on my finger caught the late afternoon light slanting in through the window. I stared at it for a long, still moment before making myself look away.
“He beat me at rummy this morning,” said a voice from the doorway.
I looked up. Sandra, one of the nurses I’d gotten to know over the last few days—fifties, efficient, with the warmth of someone who’d learned to care without losing themselves to it. She leaned against the doorframe with a chart under one arm and a smirk of genuine bemusement.
“I’m sorry?”
“Your grandfather.” She nodded at him. “He asked if I played rummy. I said I did. Big mistake.” She gave Grandpa a glare thatwas mostly fond. “Three hands in a row, and then he suggested we play for pudding cups.”
