“Your wife’s here,” Diego said, without a trace of inflection, and then he was gone, the door swinging shut behind him with a soft, definitive click, and it was just the two of us in the enormous, echoing quiet of the bay.
Daniel set the thing down on the workbench and looked at me across the wide stretch of concrete floor between us. He said nothing at first. He was doing the thing he always did, taking stock in that patient way that had always made me feel both seen and a bit transparent, waiting for me to get to it in my own time.
“The whole town knows,” I said.
“Yeah.” He pushed off the workbench and straightened. “Donna, probably.”
“Donna,” I confirmed. I’d replayed the conversation on a loop the whole drive over. “I didn’t even think—“ I stopped. Tried again. “I didn’t consider any of that. We didn’t consider any of that.”
“No.” The word was simple and without apology. “We didn’t.”
I pressed my lips together. “I went to the courthouse.”
Surprise flickered in his eyes, quick and unguarded, but he held himself still and waited for me to explain.
“Before I came here. I needed to confirm it before I said it out loud to you, because saying it out loud to you makes it real.” I looked at him across the polished concrete. “The license has been filed, Daniel. Sandra mailed it. I guess it fell out of my purse somewhere at the hospital and ended up at the nurses’ station, and she mailed it because she thought I’d simply forgotten about it with everything going on with Gus.” I stopped. Made myself finish it. “It’s been received and processed. It’s on record. We’re actually, legally, really married.”
The bay settled into a deep, thick quiet around us. Somewhere outside, traffic moved past on the street. In here, nothing moved at all.
Daniel looked at me for a long moment, his expression doing something complicated and unreadable. Then he said, “Okay.”
“Okay,” I repeated, incredulous. “That’s your response? Okay?”
“I mean.” He spread his hands in that easy, disarming way of his. “It’s not okay in the sense that it went according to any kind of plan. But the world didn’t end, Ellie.”
“We’re married, Daniel.”
“We are.”
“By accident.”
“Technically by Sandra,” he said, “but yes.”
The laugh that came out of me was not entirely voluntary. It escaped before I could catch it. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and wrestled it under control as I looked up at the ceiling of the bay, which was very high and thoroughly unhelpful. “Gus is improving. Which is wonderful, obviously. It’s the only thing I actually wanted, but it also means the plan has a longer runway than we thought, and the whole town already thinks?—”
“Come over tonight,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”
I looked at him. He looked back at me with that steadiness of his, solid and unhurried, and I couldn’t tell if it was genuine calm or something he’d arranged for my benefit, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to figure it out right now. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“Tonight,” I said.
He nodded once, like it was already settled.
From somewhere deeper inside the station, a voice rose in a passionate and clearly losing argument about something—football, maybe, or whose turn it was to clean the kitchen—followed by a collective groan and what sounded like Powell’s distinctive bray of laughter. The ordinary, rumbling noise of the place, unbothered by the extraordinary thing sitting in the middle of the bay between us like a piece of furniture neither of us knew where to put.
I looked down at the ring on my finger. Then back up at Daniel.
“The whole town,” I said.
“The whole town,” he confirmed, and his mouth curved at the corner. “It will be okay.”
How many times had he said that to me in our life? Somehow he always made it true. So I shoved down the panic and nodded back. “Tonight.”
“Tonight,” he agreed.
“I’ll bring pizza.”
I turned and walked back through the door, and behind me, in the quiet I left in my wake, I heard something low and warm that might have been a quiet laugh, or might have been nothing at all. Either way, I felt it somewhere it had absolutely no business being felt, and I kept walking.
