Page 20 of Marrying the Pakhan

“Now, if you’d like it done. Or we can schedule something more formal for another day.”

“No.” I glance at Viktor, who nods, steady, present, not pushing me either direction. “Now’s fine.”

Hastings spreads the papers across a small table near the window, and I sign where he indicates, hands slightly unsteady in a way that has nothing to do with the marriage this time and everything to do with a grandmother and grandfather I haven’t spoken to in years, releasing something they set aside for me before either of them died, a door I chose to leave locked until exactly this moment.

“That’s everything,” Hastings says, gathering the papers. “The funds will transfer within the week. Congratulations, on both counts.”

He shakes my hand, then Viktor’s, and excuses himself with the efficient, unbothered air of a man who’s finalized a hundred trusts and feels nothing extra about this one. I stand there in the hallway holding a folder that represents money I haven’t touched in years and a marriage that’s four minutes old.

Dimitri excuses himself to take a call that conveniently starts ringing the second Hastings leaves, and Denise follows shortly after, offering me one last look, warm and a little knowing, before she goes.

Viktor and I stand there in the hallway, government fluorescents overhead, both of us slightly unsure what happens now that the thing we came here to do is done, twice over.

“That’s it,” I say. “We’re married. And apparently, I’m suddenly not broke.”

“We’re married.” He says it slower than the clerk did, testing the shape of it, ignoring the second half entirely, like the money means nothing to him one way or another, which, I’m realizing now, it probably doesn’t.

“Feels anticlimactic.”

“It’s supposed to.” He studies me for a second, his expression going quieter than at the club, quieter than at the park, like he’s seeing me clearly for the first time standing in a courthouse hallway on a Thursday morning. “Doesn’t mean it has to stay that way.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything at all, and he doesn’t push. He just keeps looking at me a beat longer than the moment strictly requires, long enough that I feel it in my chest instead of just noticing it with my eyes.

“I should get to work,” I say finally, because someone has to say something, and my voice is the only one available.

“I’ll walk you to your car.”

He does, hand resting lightly at the small of my back the entire way, not possessive, just there, and when we reach my car, he doesn’t try to kiss me, doesn’t push for anything the day hasn’t already offered. He just watches me get in, waits until I’ve started the engine, and lifts two fingers off the doorframe, half a wave, half a promise this isn’t over.

I watch him in my rearview mirror the whole way out of the lot, and the look on his face follows me longer than it has any right to, all the way to work, sitting in my chest through the entire drive, a decision I made and a feeling I haven’t fully caught up to yet, both at once.

By the time I clock in, I’ve replayed the courthouse hallway probably a dozen times, the way he looked at me, the way he said, doesn’t mean it has to stay that way, like it was a promise instead of just a line.

I don’t know what to do with any of it. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel about a marriage that was only ever meant to be a piece of paper, and a trust fund I’d spent years pretending I didn’t need. And yet…

I’m married. The word still doesn’t feel like it belongs to me.

Somewhere underneath the disbelief, quieter than I want to admit, it doesn’t feel entirely wrong either.

8

HARPER

My apartment looks smaller when empty than it ever did when it was full, boxes stacked by the door, the outline of a couch that lived against that wall for three years leaving a paler patch on the paint.

Ginger’s drawings are still on the fridge when I go to grab the last box from the kitchen. I peel them off one at a time, careful with the tape, and my throat does the tight thing it’s been doing on and off for days now.

I fold them flat and slide them into a folder instead of a box, somewhere I won’t accidentally crush them under something heavier.

Ginger sits on the bare floor of her old room while I finish, arms wrapped around her knees, watching the movers Viktor sent carry out the last of our things.

“We’re really going,” she says.

“We are.” I crouch down next to her. “You can bring anything you want in the car with us. Doesn’t have to go in a box.”

She thinks about it, then goes and gets the stuffed rabbit off her stripped bed, the one Mia gave her the Christmas before she died, and holds it the entire drive without saying much else.

“Last load,” Viktor says from the doorway, two boxes stacked in his arms like they weigh nothing. He’s traded the suit for jeans and a plain shirt, sleeves pushed up, and it’s strange seeing him like this, in my kitchen, doing something as ordinary as carrying boxes down two flights of stairs.