Chapter 3_A Marriage On Paper

I looked at his hand for a very long time.

Behind the study door, I could still hear the party falling apart. Chairs scraping. People whispering. Somewhere in the middle of it, my mother's voice, calling my name again and again.

Without really deciding to, I walked to the window.

The study looked over the front driveway. Down below, the main doors flew open and Ryan came out fast, his jacket half on, his face red with anger. Not shame. Anger. He had been made to kneel in front of everyone, and he could not forgive anyone but himself for that.

He never looked back at the house. Not once.

Sabrina ran after him, holding up her dress, her heels slipping on the stones. "Ryan! Wait!" He didn't wait. He just opened the car door and let her climb in, and then the red lights went down the long driveway and disappeared into the dark.

That was it. Three years of my life, and he did not even look up at the window to see if I was alive.

I thought it would hurt more. But what I felt was strange and quiet, like the last candle going out in a room I had already left.

"They're gone," Damien said behind me. He wasn't looking at the driveway. He was looking at me. "Ryan won't be a problem tonight."

"He doesn't know where I am," I whispered. "He doesn't know anything."

"No."

"And that's what you want? A marriage no one knows about?"

"For now."

I turned around. "What do you get out of this?"

"That is not tonight's question."

"I'm not a child. You can't just ask a woman to marry you and give her nothing."

"I gave you a way out." His voice was flat and cool, like he was reading from a report. "It is a contract, Lila. The papers will be ready tomorrow. You will read them before you sign anything. But tonight, I need only one answer."

A contract.

Of course it was. What else would it be? Men like him did not marry girls like me for love. I almost laughed at myself, because for one silly second, standing there in his jacket, a small hopeful part of me had wondered.

I felt my bag buzz against my hip. I took the phone out. *Mom.* Twelve missed calls.

Twelve. Not one from my father. Not one text asking, *Are you okay?*

I thought about what she said in the hallway. *Who will want you after tonight?* And I thought about the next morning, and the next, and how I would wake up in my childhood bedroom with everyone watching me, waiting for me to be sensible. Waiting for me to go back and say thank you for being allowed to be hurt.

I was so tired of being the good girl.

I looked up at him. "If I say yes, is it forever?"

"No."

"Will you hurt me?"

Something flickered in his dark eyes, too fast for me to read. "No."

It was not a promise. It was just a fact, said the way he said everything. But I believed it more than any promise Ryan ever made me.

I put my hand in his.

His fingers closed around mine, firm and brief, and let go at once, like a signature on a page. His skin was cold.

"Yes," I said. My voice shook. "But I'm doing this for me. Not for you."

"Good," he said. "I did not ask you to do it for me."

It should have stung. Strangely, it didn't. It felt almost like relief, to stand in front of someone who wasn't pretending.

He took out his phone and made one short call. "Grant. Side entrance. Five minutes. And call the registry office on Wren Street. I need a registrar in thirty minutes." A pause. "Yes, tonight. Pay whatever they ask."

I stared at him. A government office at eleven at night. I was learning that there was a kind of money that could wake up anything.

We left through the kitchen, past the startled cooks, past the cold cakes and the unopened champagne that was meant for my engagement. I still had his jacket on. I still wore my pale blue dress with a stain from the glass. As we walked out into the cool night air, I felt like a runaway bride who had run away from her own wedding before it even began.

The black car waited at the side door. A tall man in a gray suit opened the back door for us without a single question. That was Grant, I would learn later. A man who had worked for Damien for ten years and had never once looked surprised.

Inside the car, there was nothing but silence.

Damien opened his laptop and typed fast, his face lit by the pale blue glow of the screen. He didn't look at me. He didn't ask if I was cold or hungry or scared. I watched him from the corner of my eye.

He was thirty-five. Only five years older than Ryan. Ryan's grandfather had married again late in life, and Damien was the youngest son of that second marriage. In the Ashford family he was called Uncle because of blood, not age. But he sat in that car like a man who had already lived three lifetimes, and had no wish to live a fourth.

Who are you? I wanted to ask. Why would a man like you want a girl like me?

My phone buzzed again. *Mom.*

"Switch it off," Damien said, without looking up.

"It's my mother."

"I know. Switch it off." He typed another line. "You can't think with everyone shouting in your ear."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to say she was my mother, that she had the right, that I should at least tell her I was safe. But I knew what she would say. She would cry and scream and make me feel like a criminal. And I would give in. I always gave in.

My thumb pressed the button. The screen went black.

The silence that followed felt like cutting a rope. One side of me fell away into the dark, and I couldn't tell if I was falling or flying.

"Why me?" I asked, quietly, to the dark window.

"Not tonight."

"You can't marry someone and not tell her why."

"I can."

"That's cruel."

For the first time, his typing stopped. He did not turn his head. But his hand rested on the keys, very still.

"Perhaps," he said. "But it is better than a lie."

I did not understand what he meant. I only knew that something in the way he said it made my throat tight. I leaned my head against the cold glass and watched the city lights slide past like a river of tiny, far-away stars.

The registry office was small and ugly. Yellow lights. A water cooler that hummed in the corner. A sleepy woman in a green cardigan was waiting for us, her hair half undone, and she kept glancing at Damien like she expected him to disappear. Grant stood by the door with two folders and a face like stone.

I saw myself in the glass of a picture frame. Smudged makeup. Red eyes. A man's black jacket hanging off my shoulders. I looked like someone who had been pulled from the water.

Maybe I had.

"Identification, please," the registrar said.

I handed over mine with fingers that wouldn't stop trembling. Damien gave his without a word.

She typed quietly for a while. Then she turned the papers toward us and held out a pen.

"Sign here, please. Both of you."

My name looked small on the page. Lila Monroe. The last time I would ever write it that way. I thought of the girl who woke up this morning, happy and silly, practicing how to say "yes" to Ryan in front of three hundred people. She felt like someone I had read about in a book, a long time ago.

My hand shook so much that the first letter came out crooked.

Beside me, Damien signed in one smooth, quick line. He did not hesitate. He did not even look at the page. It was as if he had signed this a hundred times in his head.

The registrar stamped the paper. The sound was soft and final.

"Congratulations," she said, with a tired smile. "Mr. and Mrs. Ashford."

Mrs. Ashford.

The same name as Ryan. The same name as his mother, who had looked at me tonight like I was dirt. By morning, I would be the aunt of the man who broke my heart.

I should have laughed. I should have cried. Instead, I just stood there, holding a pen that did not feel like mine, and wondered what exactly I had done.

Damien finally turned and looked at me. There was no smile on his face, no warmth, nothing a husband should have on his wedding night. Only those dark, unreadable eyes.

"Mrs. Ashford," he said, so low that only I could hear. "Now the real problem begins.”