I thought about Ellie’s face in the waiting room before we’d gone in. The way her jaw had tightened, the particular chin-lift she’d been doing since we were eight years old to keep herself from coming apart, the thing she thought nobody could read. The way she’d said I’m not ready with her eyes fixed on the middle distance, like the words had been pulled out of her from somewhere she hadn’t meant to leave unguarded.
I turned my mug slowly in my hands and didn’t say anything for a long moment, because something was assembling itself in the back of my mind, piece by piece, and I wanted to see the whole shape of it before I said it out loud.
“What if we—gave him what he wants?” I said.
Ellie looked up from her mug. “What?”
“What he wants. What would make him stop being scared.” I kept my voice steady, following the logic of it. “What if we told him we’re together?”
She stared at me. “Daniel?—”
“Not forever,” I said. “Just for now. For him.” I leaned forward and put my elbows on the table, closing the distance between us. “He’s got a week, Ray said. Maybe less. What if he spent that time not afraid? What if we just—let him have that?”
“You’re talking about lying to him.”
“I’m talking about giving him something real to hold onto.” I heard how that sounded and kept going before she could find the seam in it. “He’s not wrong that I love you. He’s not wrong that I show up. We’d just be rearranging which kind of love it is. Temporarily.”
She was looking at me with the expression she got when she hadn’t decided yet whether something was brilliant or completely unhinged and was doing the necessary work of figuring out which. “He’d want to see evidence, Daniel. He’s not going to take our word for it and be satisfied. You know what he’d want.” She stopped. Something shifted in her face. “He’d want us to get married. That’s what he’s been saying for ten years.”
“I know.”
“So that’s not—we can’t just—“ She caught something in my expression and stilled. “No.”
“Hear me out.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Ellie. Listen.”
She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest, which I had learned over the course of a lifetime to read asfine, talk, but I reserve the right to think this is completely insane.It was as much permission as I was likely to get, so I took it.
“Marriage licenses in Alabama,” I said. “Do you know how they work?”
A beat of silence. “...No.”
“Hollywood’s been looking into it, because he and Lucy are getting close to actually tying the knot.” She opened her mouth, and I kept going before she could redirect me. “You get the license. You do the ceremony. But the license doesn’t get filed until afterward—the officiant sends it in. Which means there’s a window between when the ceremony happens and when the paperwork gets filed.” I held her gaze across the table. “We dothe ceremony for Gus. We intercept the paperwork before it goes anywhere. Nobody files anything. And he gets to spend whatever time he has left believing his granddaughter is taken care of.”
The kitchen quiet pressed in closer, like a silent audience fascinated by this spectacle of insanity.
Ellie stared at me from across the table, working through it, the way I’d seen her work through hard things since we were children—the part where she wanted to dismiss it outright, and the part where the logic of it caught her before she could, and then underneath both of those, the part where the grief made even a genuinely insane idea start to look like solid ground.
“That is,” she said slowly, “genuinely the most reckless thing you have ever suggested to me. And Daniel, that is a high bar.”
“This is completely different.”
“It really isn’t.”
“Ellie.” I leaned forward again, closing what little distance the table allowed. “He’s scared. You’re gutted. I can fix one of those things. Possibly both of them.” I held her eyes and didn’t let go. “Let me fix it.”
God, I needed to fix this for her. It was a physical thing, that need, sitting somewhere in the center of my chest and pressing outward.
She looked at me for a long moment with an expression I couldn’t entirely read, which was unusual enough—rare enough—that I stilled and waited and didn’t push. Something moved across her face. Something that wasn’t quite agreement but was the beginning of something close to it. The moment a thing that looks impossible starts to look merely improbable, which in my experience was usually close enough.
“We’d have to be convincing,” she said quietly. “He’d see through anything that wasn’t.”
“We’ve been pretending not to be in love for ten years,” I said. “We can probably manage the reverse.”
The words were out before I’d thought them all the way through, before I’d decided whether to say them at all. Her face froze as they landed. For one full second neither of us said a single thing, and the silence in the kitchen had a different kind of weight to it than it had before.
