The Ghost Bride's Last Contract

What Her Mother Signed

The chest did not break cleanly.

Its cedar sides gave way under Mae's crowbar, but the wire stitching pulled the boards back together. Each time she struck, Elias coughed. She could not tell whether she was weakening the thing or hurting him more.

Iris put down her phone. "Emergency crew's coming. They won't get through the flood gate with a stretcher. We need him upstairs."

"I can walk," Elias said.

He could not stand. Mae tried to help him and felt water press against her hands through the fabric of his shirt, as though there were a river underneath it. A dark bruise had formed across his throat in the shape of the chest's hasp.

The stored death was becoming more exact.

Lenora sat on the floor beside the broken swallow. Her veil had fallen. She watched Mae without accusation, which was somehow worse.

"How did you get inside?" Mae asked her.

"A woman said there was a passage. A way out of the house. She told me to climb in."

"Your husband?"

"He sent her. I learned that when I heard him outside."

"Who was she?"

"Mara Quist. I don't know what he held over her. I knew she was frightened, so I trusted her."

Mae put that name away for Iris. They could find the living afterward. At the moment she needed the dead woman to remember something other than the man who had loved her over breakfast.

"Did they close the hasp first?"

"No. He sewed it. He said that was the part I'd agreed to."

The silver wire. Mae pulled one broken board aside and saw the first knot, tucked beneath the lining. Her crowbar had damaged everything except the fastening that made the chest a closed place.

Her mother's voice came back to her, impatient across a childhood table: Don't attack what frightens you. Find out what's holding it together.

Mae cut the first knot. Nothing happened.

The second knot opened and the painted breakfast washed across the wood. Fruit, fingers, tablecloth dissolved into pale streaks. Lenora pressed both hands to her mouth.

At the third knot, Elias rolled onto his side. Water poured out of the chest and across the floor, carrying scraps of paper. Mae cut until the wire lay in pieces too short to join. She could not keep the letters. She could not even keep the handwriting long enough to read it.

The ring slipped from Elias's finger.

He took one breath, then another. Mae did not touch him until he reached for her sleeve. She held his hand while he was sick onto the ruined cedar and while Lenora stood beside them, unable to remember the color of her husband's eyes.

"You said destroying it would take the letters," the ghost whispered. "You didn't say it would take what was in them."

Mae had not known. She said so.

Lenora turned away. "Then stop telling people what things cost."

They reached the hospital before dawn. The doctor kept Elias for another examination and told Mae to go home. Iris took her instead to a twenty-four-hour café opposite the emergency entrance. Lenora waited inside the shuttered lamp. Mae could feel her silence through the brass handle.

Iris ordered toast. Mae put her unopened sandwich on the table as if that settled the question of eating.

"The letters are gone," she said.

"He's alive."

"She didn't ask whether he was alive."

Iris spread butter right to the edge of her toast. "Both things can be true without one paying for the other. Eat."

Mae took a bite. It hurt her dry throat. Across the road, someone in a dressing gown leaned out of an upper window and smoked while a nurse pretended not to see.

She had thought this work would be clearer than her mother's. Find a false promise, free a person. Charge enough to keep the lights on. She had built her little practice around that sequence and carefully avoided the cases that made it insufficient.

Now a stranger knew exactly how much she had wanted her mother's storage boxes.

When Elias came out, he sat beside Iris rather than Mae. There were adhesive marks on his arm. He drank half a glass of water before apparently remembering that he could.

"What happens if I leave town?"

Mae put down her toast. "I don't know."

"Can you find out without cutting anything?"

"Yes."

"Start there."

He laid the black ring on a napkin. It had followed him from the basement in his coat pocket. He had thrown it into a hospital sharps bin, he told them, and found it against his ribs while dressing.

Iris swore. Quietly, but at length.

Mae opened the lamp. Lenora appeared at the end of the booth. No one in the café noticed except a tired waitress, who brought another cup before recalling that she would not need it.

"How many?" Elias asked the bride.

Lenora stared at the empty cup.

"Don't make me spend the whole morning on this."

"Nineteen women. Twenty unfinished acts. Mine has two."

"And every time she cuts, I get one?"

"If she cuts an active bond. A master settlement names the holder of the chapel as substitute groom. I wrote the first version."

Mae could hear the kitchen radio. Someone was discussing rain on Saturday. She wanted, suddenly, to be a woman who cared whether Saturday was wet.

"Why?" Elias said.

"So a husband who hurt his wife would suffer what she suffered."

"I'm not anybody's husband."

"Silas Wren changed it. He made property inheritance sufficient."

"After you signed?"

Lenora did not answer quickly enough.

Elias pushed the ring toward her. "You signed the changed one too."

"They promised to let me leave the house."

He stood. Mae began to rise with him, then stopped. He needed a door that someone would allow him to use. He walked out past the smoking patient's window and into the thin morning rain.

Lenora turned to Mae. "Your mother witnessed the amendment."

Mae's first response was relief. A witness was less culpable than an author. Then she hated herself for counting the distance between those words before asking what Elspeth had done.

Iris took out the photograph she had made of the wire before Mae cut it. Along the inside of its final loop, tiny letters remained visible.

ELSPETH ARDEN. RENEWAL SECURED BY ISSUE.

"Issue means a child," Mae said.

Lenora nodded.

"Me?"

"The final place is reserved for you. It isn't one of the twenty. A living bride renews the settlement."

Mae took her mother's receipt from her glove and tore it in half. The motion was childish. It accomplished nothing. She tore the halves again anyway.

Elias returned ten minutes later with a bag from the chemist. He had bought throat lozenges, dry socks, and cheap gloves for Mae's blistered hands.

He set the gloves beside the torn paper.

"I went to the bridge," he said. "The ring came back before I could throw it. So here's what happens. You do the research. I decide whether another stitch gets cut. You don't answer for me because you're sorry."

"My mother promised me to the settlement."

He was quiet for a while.

"Then you should get a vote too."

Behind the café window, a woman in a burned wedding collar pressed her palm against the glass. In the other hand she held a photograph of a little girl who, if she had survived, would be older than Mae.