Grandpa didn’t glance up from his sudoku. “She still owes me a butterscotch.”
Sandra shook her head, smiling, and then shifted into something more professional. “His reaction time is better than it was two days ago. Speech is a little cleaner. He’s still got the left side weakness, and he tires quickly, but the trajectory is encouraging.” She paused. “Dr. Whitfield will be by tomorrow. I don’t want to speak out of turn, but I don’t think he’s going to be unhappy with what he sees.”
Something in my chest loosened, just a fraction. “That’s—thank you. That’s really good to hear.”
She smiled, warm and genuine. “I don’t know if it means anything, but I’ve been doing this a long time. When people have something to hold on to, something that gives them a reason, it makes a difference.” She glanced between me and Grandpa. “I think getting you two married gave him that. Something to look forward to instead of just waiting.” She straightened, tucking the chart under her arm. “Oh, and I found the license sitting on the desk at the nurse’s station on Sunday. The night nurse mentioned she’d found it under his bed. I didn’t want it to get lost in the shuffle with everything going on, so I popped it in the mail for you.”
My ears began to ring.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice came out remarkably steady, which was extraordinary, given the panic boiling beneath it. “You — what?”
Sandra was already half-turned toward the door. “The marriage license. It was just sitting there, and I figured you’d forgotten about it with everything on your plate. Since it wasn’t leaving town, the county clerk should’ve gotten it this morning.”She smiled over her shoulder. “Congratulations again, by the way. He’s a keeper, that husband of yours.”
She left before I could form a single coherent word.
I sat stone still.
Grandpa laid down his pencil and regarded me with an expression of mild and entirely unconvincing innocence. But he couldn’t have had anything to do with this. No, this was our reckless plan biting us in the ass.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“No,” I said, on pure autopilot. “Everything’s fine.”
Everything was, in fact, the exact opposite of fine, which seemed like a woefully inadequate way to describe the situation. The license I’d believe to be in my purse, the license I’d been meaning to deal with and hadn’t, the license that was the entire structural load-bearing wall of our plan, was in the custody of the United States Postal Service—or possibly already in the hands of the county clerk—and I couldn’t do a damned thing about it.
I reached into my purse anyway, with hands that remained steady through an act of sheer will, and searched for the rectangular shape of the envelope.
My fingers found my wallet. My keys. A receipt from the pharmacy.
I looked at Grandpa.
He picked up his pencil and returned to his sudoku with the serene focus of a man with a clear conscience.
“Grandpa,” I said carefully. “Did you?—”
“I’m doing my sudoku, sweetheart.”
I pressed my lips together. I inhaled for four, held for two, and released on a slow count of six. The deep breathing exercise had never once in my life made me feel better, but I tried it anyway on the theory that maybe this time would be different.
It was not different.
I stayed another hour because leaving felt impossible and because Grandpa was good today, genuinely good, more alert and more himself than he’d been. I wouldn’t waste that by sitting in a parking lot having a quiet breakdown. He talked, and I listened and laughed in the right places and managed not to betray by word or expression or any discernible twitch the fact that I was running the same calculation over and over in the back of my mind and arriving each time at the same impossible answer.
When I finally said my goodbyes, I kissed his forehead and made myself smile one last time at the door. I got exactly as far as the elevator before I pulled out my phone.
My thumbs hovered over the screen.
Ellie:We have a problem.
I stared at it for a long moment, then deleted it. All of it, letter by letter, like undoing something I’d almost made irreversible. I couldn’t just hit Daniel with this over text. A block of words on a screen, a notification he’d read between calls or over a bad cup of station coffee—that wasn’t how you delivered news like this. This wasn’t a heads up kind of situation. This was an I need to see your actual face kind of situation. I needed to see his, and honestly I probably needed him to see mine too, because I was fairly certain that whatever face I was currently making wasn’t one a person should be alone with.
The elevator doors opened. I stepped inside.
EIGHT
DANIEL
News in small towns traveled faster than the known laws of physics agreed was possible.
