The Wedding

They married on a Thursday at 9:15 in the morning, between a couple fighting over a vending machine and a man marrying his parole officer's niece. The officiant had done eleven thousand ceremonies and read their names off a card. Sebastian said "I do" like a man initialing a memo. Imogen said it like a nurse confirming a dosage.

Marta cried anyway, exactly on cue, and hugged Imogen hard enough to crack a rib, and whispered, "If he hurts you I'll kill him with an IV line," loud enough for him to hear.

"I like her," Sebastian said, in the tone of a man reviewing security footage.

The ring was not the coat-button diamond. It was a plain band, his grandmother's, produced at the last second from his vest pocket. It was still too big. Imogen wound a twist of thread around the inside, the nurse's fix, and he watched her hands do it and said nothing at all.

The penthouse took up the forty-first floor and had the personality of a very expensive hotel, which she supposed was the point. Mrs. Petrakis, the housekeeper, showed her the kitchen with the solemnity of a curator, then burst into tears when Imogen asked where the good pans were.

"Five years," Mrs. Petrakis sobbed, "no one has used this kitchen. Five years I polish copper for ghosts.

In the library, between a first edition of something Russian and a globe that had cost a life, she found the chess set. His chess set. Walter's actual one, the border nicked where eighty years of captured knights had been set down too hard. A sticky note clung to the board in shaky pen.

FOR THE NURSE. SHE LETS ME WIN BADLY.

She sat down in front of it and cried for the first time since the will, quietly, into the expensive silence.

She never heard Sebastian in the doorway. She only knew he'd been there because when she looked up, a box of tissues stood on the table beside the board, and the doorway was empty."

Her room had a lock on her side, as contracted, and a view that made the city look like something you could hold. His room was at the other end of the hall, because of course it was. Between them lay a living room the size of the hospital ward, all glass and pale stone and furniture no one sat on.

The rules of the house took one conversation.

"I work late," he said. "I don't knock, because I don't come to your end. Mrs. Petrakis is discreet and better paid than your entire ward. If the press calls the landline, don't answer. If someone follows you from the hospital, don't lead them here, lead them to the garage, there's security."

"You've done this before."

"I've been followed before." He loosened his tie, and for a second he looked forty-one floors tired. "It's not the same thing."

Dinner was takeout eaten standing at separate ends of the kitchen island, which she decided was their first honest moment as a married couple. He caught her looking and said, "What," and she said, "Nothing. I've just never seen a man eat pad thai like it wronged him."

Something almost happened to his mouth. Not a smile. The ancestor of one.

The doorbell rang at nine.

Mrs. Petrakis had gone home. Sebastian checked the security panel and went still, which she was learning was his version of swearing.

"My cousin," he said.

Vivienne Crowther was beautiful the way bank lobbies are beautiful: money spent in the service of intimidation. She swept in with a bottle of champagne and a coat that had never met weather, and kissed Sebastian on both cheeks, and then turned to Imogen with her whole face arranged into delight.

"So this is her." She took Imogen's hands. "The nurse. Sebastian, you dark horse, everyone said a secretary, but I said no, he'd never be that obvious." Her grip was cool and perfect. "Imogen. May I call you Imogen? We're family now, and family is the only thing I take seriously."

She stayed ninety minutes. She asked about Comfrey Lane, about the hospital, about Imogen's mother, and every question arrived gift-wrapped as warmth. She admired the thread inside the ring and called it resourceful. She told three stories about Sebastian as a boy, and each one made him smaller.

At the door she turned, champagne unopened in her perfect hands, and smiled at Imogen with all her teeth.

"We'll be sisters," Vivienne said. "I do hope you last longer than the last one."