Page 10 of The Marriage Blunder

I looked back again.

His hand, the one not lost to the pillow, lay flat and open on the sheet between us. The hand that had shaken mine at the engagement dinner eleven months ago and left me with three days of tactile memory, three days of not being able to forget the pressure, the warmth, the shock of how much I liked it.

I had liked it more than I had ever admitted to anyone, least of all myself.

I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, the hand was still there.

The wedding band on it was new.

It was not there last night, unless it had been, and I was now the kind of man who missed a detail like that in the middle of everything else.

I held up my own hand. I looked at it. The ring on my hand matched. Plain band, matte finish, the kind of thing that was supposed to be subtle, but in context was the loudest object in the room.

I checked the ceiling for cameras. Not because I expected them, but because it seemed, on balance, more plausible than the alternative.

I sat up.

The room was larger than I remembered. It had a strip view seen through floor-to-ceiling windows. There was a table near the window. On the table, a piece of cream paper, folded in half.

I got out of bed, careful not to disturb the sheets or the man asleep under them. I crossed to the window, ignoring the part of me that wanted to look back, to check and see if Kenneth had moved, or if any of this was a dream that could be excused on technicality.

The document was heavier than expected. I picked it up. “Marriage Certificate,” it said at the top, in a font chosen by someone who had not met me. My name. His name. Date. Location. Names of two witnesses. Name of the officiant. Both signatures in black ink that had not yet faded.

I looked at my own signature.

It was mine.

The rest of the page did what legal documents do: described the union, the location, the conditions under which it could be dissolved. I read it twice, because that is what you do when confronted with a disaster, you double-check the data.

It checked out.

I walked back over to sit on the edge of the bed. My mind ran the numbers, not just the numbers, but the consequences, and for a brief, perfect moment, I was capable only of admiration for the sheer, elegance of the catastrophe I had engineered.

There was a protocol for this. It started with shame, migrated quickly to panic, then settled into the low, thrumming dread of knowing that Carolyn was somewhere in a hotel, maybe this hotel, possibly this very floor, and that if she found out before I found her and explained, I would never hear the end of it, not in any meaningful time frame.

I wanted to run.

I wanted to climb back into bed and try, for as long as possible, to make the rest of the world stop existing.

I did neither.

I sat. I folded my hands, careful to tuck the ring out of sight, as if that would do any good, and did what I had always done when faced with a problem I could not solve.

I did the math.

The math was not on my side.

First: If this was legal—and it looked legal, it had the paperweight and the ink to prove it—then any attempt to reverse it would involve not just humiliation, but public humiliation. There would be witnesses. There would be records.

Second: The timing. Carolyn’s wedding was not just an event, it was the event, the social lynchpin of her year, and I had managed, with surgical precision, to detonate it in a most spectacular manner.

Third: My mother would find out. She would find out before the end of the day, because nothing that happened in this family stayed private for longer than it took to boil a pot of soup, and the home nurse was an absolute sieve for this sort of thing.

The only upside was that my mother would probably be delighted. She had not once expressed a favorable opinion of Kenneth as a fiancé for her daughter, and I suspected she would find my coup, if it could be called that, darkly satisfying.

Fourth: There was a part of me that was not, if I was honest, entirely opposed to the arrangement. I didn’t know what to do with that part, so I ignored it. I’m sure I’d have to deal with it at some point, but not right now.