Chapter 1: Say I Do
“Say ‘I do,’ Nora,” my stepsister said, holding her phone up to film me. “He can’t.”
Somebody laughed. I think it was Gail.
I was standing beside a hospital bed in a bedroom bigger than the whole apartment I grew up in, wearing a white satin dress that belonged to a woman two sizes bigger than me. The straps kept sliding off my shoulders. Gail had pinned the back with three safety pins and told me not to breathe too hard.
In the bed lay Elliot Ashford. Thirty-eight years old. Founder of Ashford Aerospace. On the cover of Forbes two years ago, smiling in front of a rocket engine. For the last eight months, he’d been lying in this room in Greenwich, Connecticut, with a feeding tube, an IV pole, a heart monitor that beeped softly every second, and his eyes closed.
His face was thinner than on the magazine. Somebody had shaved him for the wedding and missed a spot under his jaw.
“Nora.” The judge cleared his throat. He was a friend of Vivian Ashford’s from the club, and he kept looking at his watch. “Do you take Elliot Ashford to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
Vivian stood at the foot of the bed in cream silk, diamonds in her ears, her dark hair smooth as glass. She was Elliot’s stepmother and his legal guardian. She’d explained everything to me the week before, very slowly, the way you’d explain it to a dog.
Elliot’s grandfather had built a trust. If Elliot was ever incapacitated, the voting power of his shares went to his spouse. Not his stepmother. His spouse. Elliot had never married. So Vivian needed him to have a wife. A quiet one. One who would sign what she was told to sign.
And my stepmother, Gail, had found her one.
“Five hundred thousand dollars,” Gail had whispered to me in her kitchen, as if she was offering me a gift. “For a year of sitting next to a bed. You do this, I pay off your daddy’s debts. Theo stays in his school. Theo stays with me.”
Theo is my little brother. He’s twelve. When our father died, the court made Gail his guardian, because I was twenty-four and working double shifts as a nursing aide and living in a studio over a nail salon. Gail never let me forget it. Theo was the one card she held, and she played it every time.
“Nora,” Gail said now, sharp. “Answer the man.”
I looked down at Elliot. His hand was lying on top of the blanket, palm up, fingers slightly curled. A nursing aide notices hands. His nails needed cutting. Nobody had put lotion on his knuckles in weeks; they were cracked.
I thought about Theo, asleep on the couch at Gail’s with his sneakers still on because she never reminded him to take them off.
“I do,” I said.
“And Elliot does too, I’m sure,” the judge said, and Kelsey laughed so hard her phone shook.
“You may kiss the bride,” she sang. “Oh wait.”
Vivian didn’t smile. She just held out a pen. “Sign here. And here. And initial there.”
I signed. The judge signed. Vivian’s lawyer signed as a witness. Nobody signed for Elliot. Nobody seemed to think that was a problem.
Then they all left. It took about four minutes. Kelsey was already uploading her video in the hallway, giggling. Gail stopped in the doorway long enough to straighten her leopard-print blouse and look me up and down.
“Don’t screw this up,” she said. “Theo stays with me as long as you behave.”
The door clicked shut.
I stood there in the borrowed dress, next to the man I’d just married, listening to the heart monitor beep. After a while I pulled the chair over and sat down, because my legs were shaking.
There was a bottle of lotion on the bedside table, still sealed. I opened it, warmed some between my palms the way they taught us in training, and started on his right hand. Knuckles. Between the fingers. The cracked skin around the nails.
“I’m sorry,” I told him quietly. “I’m Nora. I don’t know if you can hear me. I’m so sorry about all of this.”
The monitor beeped. His hand lay still in mine.
Then the door opened again, and Vivian walked back in alone, carrying a thick leather folder.
“I forgot to mention,” she said pleasantly, laying it on the bed across her stepson’s legs. “You start signing tomorrow.”
