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"Don't."

I let a beat pass, all mild concern. "I'm being sympathetic. I'm rarely sympathetic. You may want to photograph it."

"You don't get to say his name." She's shaking and it isn't fear but pure, unadulterated anger. "Not to me, not to anyone, anywhere. He is not a part of this."

She's protecting him, of course. She is aware I could end his life with a simple phone call, but the thing she doesn't know—the thing she can never know—is that I've been protecting him too. For years. Because he's hers, and the things that are hers I don't touch.

Until now.

"All right," I say.

And I mean it. I won't say his name. I won't touch him. I won't make a call.

As long as he’s a good boy and walks out of her life. I might allow her a goodbye, if I’m feeling magnanimous.

She believes me. I can see my assent land in her head and settle there, making itself comfortable. Good.

I open the car door, and then she asks, "Wait. When does this end?"

"When does what end?"

"The year. From last Thursday… next July? I want the date, written down, with your lawyer's name under it⁠—"

"Not from Thursday."

She stops. I could practically see her thoughts go back through our exchange in the garden, word by word, the way she'd go back through a chart looking for clues she missed.

"One year," I say, "from the day you say I do."

Twelve months from the day you say I do, you're free.

I said it like that, but she heard what she needed to hear. The wedding date is mine. The engagement shall be as long as I want it, despite what her father may want. And the year doesn't start until she's standing in a church saying two words that I have imagined her saying so many times that I could set it to music.

"You set the date," she says.

"I do, yes."

"When's the wedding?"

I stare at her across the roof of the car now as she's farther away. Her arms are folded across her chest. The wind is in her hair and the cranes are her backdrop—at this moment, she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I have seen her a thousand times before this, but this right here, with her in my presence ... it's devastating.

"I haven't decided," I say at last.

With that, I get in the car and drive away without looking. I want to, but I don't. She'll be standing there for a while, thinking. Mulling what I said. I know how she processes things.

She thinks I've spent tonight deciding whether I want this.

I decided years ago. Tonight was just the first time she was in the room to notice it.

The engagement lasts as long as I decide, and her father thinks he's bought himself a long one. He hasn't. Seven years I've waited. I'm not spending another season watching her from across a table that's finally mine to seat her at.

CHAPTER 6

Manon

Two weeks since the shitstorm started, and somehow in that time, Laszlo Novak has managed to organize an engagement party for a hundred and fifty people in a house with a mortuary in the basement. There's a date now. My father bargained for a long engagement so none of this would look rushed. Laszlo agreed, then set the wedding for the thirty-first of October regardless. He didn't ask my father and he didn't ask me. When I brought up the long engagement, he said he'd changed his mind and gave no reason.

A Halloween wedding. Of course it is. The man buries people for a living, and he's marrying me on the one night of the year the whole city dresses up as the dead.