The Wedding Slot I Gave Away

Chapter 2 The Walk-In Window

I did not marry Grant Ashford that afternoon. I want to be clear about that, because for two weeks afterward half the county believed I had, and the version of me who had spent six years waiting for Julian Voss might have done it just to make the story better.

What I did was sign in at the walk-in kiosk at 1:14, sit in a blue plastic chair, and hand my driver's license to a woman named Rosalind who had a laminated photo of a cat taped to her monitor. Grant sat two seats away in the row, quiet, answering emails with one thumb. He had not asked me a single question on the drive over, and he did not ask me one now.

At 1:31, Julian walked in.

I saw him in the reflection of the window glass before I turned. He had left Mia outside. That was probably deliberate. He sat down on my other side and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, and for a moment he almost looked like a man who had spent an hour thinking.

"Ellie."

"No."

"I haven't said anything."

"You're about to say something you've said before. I can tell by the shape of you."

He sat back. "Fine. Then I'll ask a question. Are you actually going to do this?"

"I don't know yet."

"You don't know." He laughed again, and this time it was real, disbelieving. "You've been in love with me since you were twenty-two. You moved into my apartment. You learned my mother's seating chart. You gave up the audit job for the foundation—"

"I didn't give it up. I was transferred."

"You asked to be transferred. Because I said it would look better."

That was true, which is why I had never said it out loud. I had been a senior associate at Halbrook & Reeve, working eighty-hour weeks on maritime compliance, and I was good at it, genuinely good, the kind of good that gets you pulled into a partner's office for a recruitment lunch. Then Julian had come to my apartment with a bottle of wine and explained that his mother would never accept a future daughter-in-law who audited the family's tax exposure, and that the foundation was a better fit for me anyway, calmer, more meaningful, and I had believed him because I loved him and because at twenty-five, being calmer and more meaningful sounded like growing up.

I was twenty-eight now. I had spent three years running the Voss Family Foundation's grant cycle for youth sailing programs and I could describe every one of those programs in detail and I could not remember a single thing I had said at the last Halbrook review.

"That was my choice," I said. "You didn't make it."

"I made it easy."

"Yes. You did."

Rosalind called my name. I stood up, and Grant stood up, and Julian stood up too.

"Where are you going?" he said.

"To ask a question."

The clerk at Rosalind's desk was a thin young man with a name tag that read DERRICK. I put my license down and said, "If I have an appointment under Voss that was canceled without my consent, is there anything I can do about it?"

Derrick typed. "Was the cancellation made from an authorized account?"

"It was made by someone who wasn't me."

"Then it's a civil matter," he said, kindly, in the voice of a man who had said this before. "We can't verify consent on a canceled appointment. If both parties are present and agree, you can file a new application today. There's a twenty-four-hour waiting period for licenses, so the earliest you could pick it up is tomorrow afternoon."

Twenty-four hours. I looked at the paper on the counter and thought about how small the distance was between the life I had built and the life I had planned, and how little of it was on that form.

"Ellie." Julian had come up behind me. He put his hand on my shoulder. "Let's not do this here."

I looked at his hand, and then at his face, thirty-six hours of stubble, blue eyes, a face I had drawn in the margins of notebooks when I was twenty-three.

"No," I said.

"Thank God."

"No, I mean no, I'm not doing this with you." I slid the application back to Derrick. "I'll take the form. I'll bring it back tomorrow."

"With the other party present," Derrick said.

"Right," I said. "With the other party."

I turned around. Grant was still standing near the kiosk, hands in his pockets, watching me with an expression that was not hope and not pity. It was more like attention. Like he was reading a document.

"You heard him," I said.

"I heard him."

"This is a bad idea. I'm not asking you to fix anything. I'm not asking for money or a merger or your family name. I don't want a deal. I want—"

"I know what you want," Grant said. "You want the day back."

That stopped me, because no one had said it out loud, and nobody honest could have said it in fewer words.

"The day is gone," I said.

"The day is gone. Tomorrow isn't." He looked past me at Julian, then back at me. "I'll be here at one o'clock. If you don't come, I'll leave. If you come, you should know what you're walking into."

"Which is what."

"My mother," Grant said. "The board. A merger my father started and never finished. And the fact that everyone in this county will assume I stole you."

"You didn't steal me."

"No," he said. "But it'll be easier for them if they think I did."