The Substitute Vow

Find Him

Michael Prudence Adams was on his second cup of coffee and his fourth page of a contract he was beginning to strongly suspect was written in bad faith when his father called.

He let it ring once, twice. He answered on the third, because he always answered on the third. Some habits were deeper than decisions.

"Dad."

"Good morning, Michael. Are you at home?"

He looked around his apartment. Floor to ceiling windows, the city spread below like a circuit board. Clean surfaces, everything in its place. The kind of quiet he had constructed deliberately and maintained with some effort. "Yes."

"Good. Stay there. I'm coming to you."

Michael set down his coffee. "Why?"

A pause so brief most people would have missed it. He didn't. He had been reading his father's silences for twenty eight years and had become, through sheer accumulated practice, fluent in them.

This particular silence meant the answer I'm about to give you is not the full answer.

"Jeremy didn't come home last night."

Michael closed his eyes. Opened them. "When you say didn't come home—"

"I mean that it is currently his wedding day, in approximately two hours and twenty minutes, and he is not answering his phone, he is not at his apartment, nobody I've spoken to has seen him since eleven o'clock last night."

The words landed one at a time, each with their own specific weight.

Michael stood. He moved to the window. Below, the city was going about its Saturday with complete indifference to the Adams family and all its complications.

"You need to tell me," he said, very evenly, "that there is a good reason you're telling me this instead of the woman he's supposed to be marrying in two hours and twenty minutes."

"Michael—"

"Because the alternative is that you have some idea in your head that I am not going to like."

"Come downstairs," his father said. "I'm outside."

Samuel Adams was sixty one and looked fifty, which was either genetics or the particular discipline of a man who believed that appearances were a form of power and therefore maintained his with the same attention he brought to everything else that mattered. He was standing beside his car when Michael came out of the building, dark coat, no tie, hands in his pockets, and he looked up when he heard his son's footsteps and said nothing for a moment.

Michael had always been the one who looked like him. Same height, same build, same quality of stillness that people sometimes mistook for coldness and was in fact simply the absence of wasted movement. Jeremy had gotten his mother's energy, restless, bright, always slightly tilted toward the next thing.

"Say it," Michael said.

Samuel said it.

The silence that followed lasted approximately eight seconds, which was longer than Michael usually allowed silences to last, which told Samuel everything he needed to know about how his son was receiving the information.

"No," Michael said.

"I need you to think about what—"

"No, Dad. I've thought about it. It took me four seconds. The answer will always be no."

"Five hundred guests—"

"Are going to have to be disappointed. It happens. Weddings get cancelled. It's not a—"

"Nicholas McGriff's daughter." Samuel's voice didn't rise, didn't harden, simply became more exact. A scalpel rather than a hammer. "His only daughter. The man has nothing left, Michael, not really, and this wedding, the joining of these families, it's the one thing he's been able to offer her. You know what it would do to him. You know what it would do to her."

Michael's jaw tightened.

"She doesn't deserve any of this," his father continued, quietly. "You know, she designed the dress herself. Jeremy told me she worked on it for four months."

"Don't."

"I'm merely—"

"Don't do that. Don't use her to manage me."

"I'm only asking you," Samuel said, "to be, for a few hours, your brother's stand-in. You're familiar enough. You've been mistaken for each other before. She'll have her wedding. Think about it, she'd only met you twice. She'll be in a veil, she'll be—"

"She'll be marrying the wrong man." Michael turned and looked at his father with eyes that gave very little away and were, up close, the grey-green of deep water. "She'll be standing at an altar saying vows to someone she didn't choose. You understand that's what you're describing."

Samuel met his gaze and didn't look away. "I understand that Jeremy has put us all in an impossible position and that the least damaging path through it is the one I'm asking you to take. One day, Michael." Samuel said, "Afterwards, when Jeremy resurfaces, the situation can be..."

"Can be what, exactly?" Michael asked, and his voice had gone very level in the way that it did when he was working hard to keep something contained. "Corrected? Annulled? What is the sentence you're not finishing, Dad?"

His father looked at him for a long moment. "That depends on Jeremy."

Which was not an answer. Which had never, in Michael's experience, been an answer, and yet somehow always ended conversations.

Michael turned back to the city. A cab moved along the street below. A woman walked a dog. Saturday proceeding as Saturdays do.

He thought about Nicholas McGriff, who had once been one of the steadiest men he'd known, quietly dismantled by bad luck and worse people. He thought about a woman in a dress she'd apparently spent months making, getting ready right now in a house two miles from here, with no idea that the ground beneath her wedding was hollow.

He thought about his brother, somewhere in the city, unreachable, having done what Jeremy always ultimately did, made himself the one thing in the room that nobody could account for.

I am going to kill Jeremy, he thought, with a silent conviction. I am going to find him and I am going to kill him.

"Three hours," Michael said finally. "Ceremony and first part of the reception. That's all I can afford."

His father's shoulders dropped, just slightly, with something that might have been relief.

"And you find him today," Michael continued. "Not tonight. Today. I don't care what it takes."

"Of course."

"I mean it, dad."

"I know you do." Samuel put a hand briefly on his son's shoulder, one of the few gestures of physical affection he'd ever been comfortable with. "Thank you, Michael."

Michael looked at the hand. Then at his father.

"Don't thank me," he said. "Find that irresponsible son of yours."