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“Oh really?” Mel’s eyebrows pop up at this.
“And thank God for that,” Lucy exclaims. “Imagine if she’d been home when they found that dead body. Or worse if she’d been around when the murder took place! How completely traumatizing!”
She has no idea. Jack moves closer to me and sets an arm around my shoulder in a show of husbandly concern. Do I lean into his touch? Yes, yes, I do.
But I’m sure to tell myself that it’s for our audience’s benefit.
Jack bends down to press a soft kiss to my temple and for a second I’m thrown by the tenderness of the gesture, but then he murmurs softly into my hair, “We need to get the marriage license signed asap.”
Right, he just needed to relay a message. Ix-nay on the enderness-tay.
There’s no room for tenderness in a murder marriage of convenience.
“Well, let’s go sign the marriage license then I can talk to the police,” I say. “You said they’ve been looking for me, and I’d hate for them to mistake my state of wedded bliss as me trying to evade them.” I laugh as naturally as possible.
“Uh, okay.” Mel is giving me a funny look, and I find I can’t meet her eyes. Lying to my friend feels horrible—and this is only the beginning of that. “I can’t believe you two got married.” I hear the unspoken message behind her words: and you didn’t invite me.
This is awful. Up until this point I’ve been so focused on making sure we got married and whether or not the plan would even work that I forgot to consider how many people we were going to have to lie to. How many people we were going to hurt.
This is why you should never murder someone.
Well this and the sixth commandment.
Let’s not forget that one.
“We would have invited you,” I say quickly, “but it was a last minute thing.”
“It’s true,” Emily speaks up. “Once they ran into us, Nora wanted to invite you too, but Reynolds said no.” She shoots him a mildly chastening look. “I guess he was in too much of a hurry to marry this one.” She hikes a thumb my way.
“Yes, well, I’d already let her slip away once before,” Reynolds says smoothly. “I couldn’t let it happen again.”
Dang, he’s good at this. Even I almost believed that’s how he truly felt.
“Speaking of which, how about we sign the marriage certificate?” he adds, looking the judge’s way.
Mel is still looking somewhere between confused and hurt, but she shrugs. “Sure, go ahead.” She eyes her watch. “The guys will all be here any second. I told Noah where Nora was, they just all had to cross town to get here.”
Lovely. Let’s add three detectives to this fake wedding. Sounds like just what we need.
Jack clearly agrees—I’ve never seen anyone grab a pen and scrawl their name so fast in my life. It’s my turn next and I hear Lucy squeal from behind me, “Last time you’ll sign something with your maiden name, Mrs. Reynolds.”
A spike of panic stabs through me and the pen slips on the paper, giving my O a squiggly appearance. Mrs. The word grates across my skin, a reminder of the wounds inflicted by my own mother as she waltzed in and out of my life—bouncing from being Mrs. Donovan one year to Mrs. Porter the next, only to become Mrs. Sharp two tears after that. Let’s just say that my mom never met a man whose last name she was afraid to take.
“I’m actually keeping my last name,” I hear myself say as I finish my signature with a possessive flourish. I will not be my mother.
“Oh.” Lucy can’t keep the surprise out of her initial response, but she quickly course corrects. “Sorry, I didn’t know.”
“No worries,” I chirp. My eyes land on Jack. He’s staring intently at me, the crease on his forehead suggesting he’s deep in thought. I swallow hard, worried I’ve offended him. After all, when he proposed to me three years ago he made kind of a big deal about me taking his last name.
Well, at least it seemed like a big deal at the time. In retrospect, all he really did was include it in his list of all the things he was looking forward to sharing with me. He tucked it right between a home and a family.
But still. Even that little mention was too much for me to deal with at the time.
My mom had me at only 17-years-old. She made it through two weeks of sleep-interrupted nights before taking off and leaving me in the care of her parents. She reappeared when I was 4-years-old with a man attached to her side, waving her wedding ring in my grandparents’ faces and saying she was ready to be my mom. Two months later her new husband was out of the picture and two weeks after that I was back with my grandparents. Thankfully they were smart enough to hire lawyers to get them custody at that point, since eight months later my mom was back with a new husband in tow, trying to take me again. After that she popped in and out of my life, always in conjunction with either a marriage or a divorce.
Despite her antics, I craved my mom’s attention, and in my childish mind that meant finding boys of my own so I had something to talk to her about when she came to town. And I do mean boys literally. I was only 9 when I had my first boyfriend, 10 when I had my first kiss, 11 when I first started sneaking out of the house to meet boys, and 13 when my grandparents pulled me out of public school and started sending me to a private all girls school—before I could end up like my mother.
This was absolutely the right decision.
