Chapter 5: Courthouse

Chloe stepped out of the car and stood on the pavement outside the courthouse, smoothing the plain white fabric with both hands out of habit rather than hope. There was nothing to smooth. The dress was simple, and chosen by someone who hadn't thought about her at all when they chose it. She looked down at herself for one brief moment and sighed.

Her father stepped out behind her. Then Evelyn, adjusting her coat, already scanning the entrance with the practiced eye of a woman managing appearances. Amelia hadn't come. The plan was to tell the Grey family she was sick, that she couldn't make it, that their law required the first daughter to marry before the second and so here they were. Chloe had heard Amelia scoff at that lie from behind her bedroom door the night before. Not with guilt. Just with the mild amusement of someone watching other people handle something inconvenient.

Inside the courthouse the Grey family had not yet arrived.

That gave Chloe a little relief. She took a slow breath and let it settle. She wasn't ready. She didn't know if she would ever be ready, but at least for this one moment she didn't have to pretend.

Then Evelyn walked up to her.

"Don't pretend you're not happy to be married into one of the richest families in New York," she said, her voice low and pointed, looking Chloe over the way you look at something you're packaging for delivery.

Chloe said nothing. She kept her eyes forward.

Evelyn reached out and with a light but deliberate pressure turned Chloe's face toward her. Not roughly. Just enough to make the point.

"When I'm talking to you, you look at me," she said. "Stop feigning ignorance."

Chloe's eyes watered before she could control it. Just slightly.

Evelyn noticed immediately. Her expression shifted into something that looked like fake concern.

"No, no," she said softly, almost gently, reaching up as though to touch her face. "Don't cry on your wedding day. You might worsen that ugly face of yours."

She said it the way you say something you've been wanting to say for a long time and have finally found the right occasion for. Then she pulled her hand back and straightened, satisfied.

Chloe blinked. Held herself very still.

Richard walked toward them from across the entrance hall, his eyes moving over the situation the way they moved over everything, assessing, calculating, already past whatever feeling might have been appropriate.

He looked at Chloe's face. At the faint wetness at the corners of her eyes.

"I hope those are tears of joy?" he asked.

Something cracked open in her chest. Not loudly. But deep.

"What have I done to you guys?" she asked, shaking her head a little.

The words came out quietly. The question she had been carrying her entire life, the one she had never been able to stop asking no matter how many times it went unanswered.

"Please don't start with that question again," Evelyn said, already looking away, already bored by it.

"You promised my mom you would take good care of me—" Chloe continued, her voice steady even as her chest hurt.

"And that is what I'm doing," Richard cut her off. He stepped closer, lowering his voice. "Now clean those miserable tears of yours and smile while you wait for your soon to be husband."

He said it directly into her ear, calm and final, the way you deliver an instruction to someone you fully expect to obey. Then he straightened and stepped back and that was the end of it. As far as he was concerned, the conversation was over.

Chloe stood where she was and pressed her feelings down into a place she had learned to keep them over many years of practice. She was not going to cry in this building. She was not going to give any of them the satisfaction of watching her fall apart in the corridor of a courthouse on the morning they handed her to a stranger.

Then someone across the hall said something when they saw a particular someone.

"Isn't that Catherine?."

Evelyn's entire energy shifted. Chloe turned slightly and watched her stepmother cross the room with a wide and seamless smile, arms open, moving toward a tall and polished woman who had just walked through the entrance with her husband. The Grey family had arrived. Evelyn reached them and became someone else entirely, warm and gracious, like a different woman had stepped into her clothes.

Richard moved toward Alexander Grey with his hand extended, and Alexander looked at him with eyes that were already asking a question he intended to have answered.

"You are going to give me a good reason why you changed the bride," Alexander said.

Richard nodded, composed. "Let's start," he said simply.

And just like that, they were moving.

Lucien walked forward.

Chloe saw him before she was ready to.

He was sharp in his suit, the kind of composed that wasn't performed but simply was, as though he had been born already knowing how to take up space in a room without trying. His face was cold in the way that meant his mind was somewhere else entirely. She felt something catch in her chest when she looked at him, something she immediately pushed back down, because she recognized in his expression what she had known all along. He was not here. Not really. His body had shown up to sign the papers but whatever was happening inside him had nothing to do with this room or this moment or her.

She looked away quickly.

The magistrate's voice filled the small space. The words were familiar from films and other people's lives, words about love and sickness and health and forever, and they sounded almost ironic to Chloe standing here in her plain dress with her stepmother's voice still in her ear and her father's instructions still burning in her chest.

"Do you take this woman to be your wife, to love and to care for, in sickness and in health?"

Lucien answered quickly. The kind of quickly that means a person just wants to be done.

The same question came to her. She heard it as though from a slight distance. The words felt like they belonged to someone else's life.

"Yes," she said.

"I now pronounce you husband and wife."

The magistrate placed the papers on the table and Lucien signed without sitting down, leaned over the desk and moved the pen across the line with the efficiency of a man signing a business document he has already reviewed. Then he stood and stepped back.

Chloe picked up the pen.

She looked at the line where her name was meant to go and felt something she hadn't expected. Not sadness. Something heavier. The feeling of a door closing. She thought briefly, of her mother's bracelet on her wrist. She thought of the promise she had made to herself at the window that morning. Then she signed.

When she looked up, her father and Evelyn were already standing with Lucien's parents, talking easily, all four of them arranged in the comfortable posture of people concluding a successful arrangement. Not one of them looked at her. She was standing three meters away with her name freshly written on a marriage certificate and not a single person in the room acknowledged it.

She knew they didn't see her. She had always known that.

But it hurt every single time they showed it.

She collected herself quietly, then she went out, picked up the bag she had packed that morning, and took it from the car. Everything she owned that mattered was in it.

A man approached her.

"Hi, I'm Lucien's assistant, but you can call me Caleb, ma'am," he said. His voice was even and professional but not unkind.

"Chloe," she told him.

He nodded. "Follow me please."

She followed him out of the building and across to where a dark car waited. Lucien was already there. The driver opened the door for him and he got in. The door began to close and then Caleb's hand came out and held it quietly, holding the space open for her.

She got in.

The car pulled into traffic and for a while neither of them spoke.

Then Lucien turned.

He looked at her properly for the first time. Not a glance. A full look, the kind that takes someone in and decides something about them. His jaw tightened slightly.

"Don't mistake this for a real marriage," he said.