The Wedding Slot I Gave Away

The county clerk's office smelled like toner and lemon floor cleaner. I had been standing in the same spot for forty minutes, shifting my weight between heels that were already pinching, watching the digital number board above the service windows flick from 104 to 105. Two more numbers. We were two numbers away from becoming Mr. and Mrs. Julian Voss. "You keep checking your phone," Julian said, not looking up from his own. He was scrolling through something with his thumb, the cuff of his navy blazer riding up over a Rolex his mother had given him for his twenty-eighth birthday. "It's not going to jump ahead." "I'm checking the time." "It's 10:42. We have all day." We did not have all day. At noon his mother expected us at the Peninsula Club for a lunch with three board members, because in Julian's world even a marriage license was a step in a quarterly strategy. I had spent four years learning that language, and I had been proud of it the way a transplant is proud of learning a local accent. Mia chose that moment to arrive. She came through the glass doors in a camel coat and the kind of smile that made other people want to smile back. Julian's oldest friend, his college roommate's cousin, the woman who had planned his thirtieth surprise party and his father's memorial reception and who had always told me, with sincere eyes, that she was so glad he had finally found someone steady. "Hey," she said, breathless, warm. "Sorry I'm late. I had to circle twice." "You're not on the appointment," I said. It came out sharper than I meant. "We only have the two of us." "I know, I just wanted to see it happen." She touched my arm. "You look beautiful. That dress is perfect." It was a cream dress with silk buttons down the back. I had chosen it in March for a courthouse morning and worn it three times around my bedroom to make sure it did not wrinkle when I sat. I said thank you. The board changed to 106. "Oh," Mia said, in a voice that carried. "Wait. I think there's a problem." The clerk looked up. Mia turned her phone around so the whole row could see it, and there it was: an appointment cancellation screen, confirmation number, timestamp 9:58 a.m., the name Voss, Julian. Somebody behind me snickered. Then somebody else. A man in a flannel shirt with a fishing hat under his arm laughed out loud, and a woman near the water fountain covered her mouth and made a sound like a startled bird. "Canceled?" I said. "Girl, you really didn't check," Mia said, and she sounded almost gentle about it. "We were betting on how long it would take you. I said you'd notice at the window. Julian said you wouldn't notice until they asked for the forms." I looked at Julian. He had slid his phone into his pocket and was smiling, the loose crooked smile that had gotten him out of a hundred small things with me. He shrugged one shoulder. "You're too clingy lately," he said. "I figured a morning here would cool you off." "Cool me off." "You call me four times a day. You ask where I am. My mother noticed." He said it the way you would report weather. "It's a lot, Ellie." The number board changed to 107. The room tilted slightly. I put my hand on the back of a plastic chair and it squeaked under my palm. The woman at window three called out, "One-oh-seven?" and nobody moved, and I stood there with my cream dress and my cream shoes and my cream life, understanding one thing very clearly. The cancellation had gone through at 9:58. He had been sitting beside me at 10:15, holding my hand, telling me my lipstick was smudged and I should fix it before the photo. "You canceled our license," I said, "while we were in the parking lot." "I didn't cancel it. Mia handled it." "He asked me to," Mia said brightly. "You know how he is. He hates being the bad guy." "So you're the good guy," I said. "I'm the honest one." The man in the fishing hat laughed again. The clerk leaned on her elbow and looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone who had seen worse, but not much. Two numbers. I had driven forty minutes in traffic and woken up at six to curl my hair for a joke. "Ellie," Julian said, and finally there was a fraction of something in his voice, a thread of caution, as if he had just now remembered that people have reactions. "Come on. Let's go get breakfast. We'll talk about it." "There's nothing to talk about." "There's a board lunch—" "I know about the board lunch." I picked up my purse from the chair. My hands were steady, which surprised me. "I've been organizing the board lunch for two weeks." "So you'll come." The elevator at the far end of the hall dinged. I heard it, but I did not really see it until he was standing there: dark coat, dark hair, no tie, a folder in one hand and a phone in the other, looking mildly out of place among the fishing hats and the laminate counters. Grant Ashford. Thirty-six years old, majority owner of Ashford Maritime, the son of the man whose foundation my father had audited for nine years. He looked at the room. He looked at the number board, at Mia's phone still glowing with the cancellation, at Julian's easy shrug. Then he looked at me. "Ellie," he said. "Grant." "You okay?" The honest answer would have taken an hour. So I said, "I need a witness." He considered that for exactly one second. "I'm good for that." Julian's head came up. "Excuse me?" Grant walked past him without answering, stopped beside me, and looked at the service windows. "108," he said. "They just called one-oh-eight. If you want to be seen today, you should ask the clerk if there's a walk-in slot." "There's walk-ins after 1:15," the clerk said without looking up. "Then we'll take one," I said. Julian laughed. But it was late and thin, and Mia's smile had frozen into something I could not read.