Married By Mistake

Chapter Two: Damage Control

Elena's POV

The phone kept ringing in my hand like it knew something I didn't.

I stared at Julian's name until the screen dimmed on its own. Then I shoved the phone in my coat pocket, unanswered, and hated how much better that felt than it should have.

"You're not gonna pick up," Jax said. Not a question.

"I'll call him back. From my own apartment. After a shower and a story that doesn't involve a marriage certificate."

"Bold plan. What's the story?"

"I don't know yet. Give me an hour."

He grabbed a jacket off the hook by the door, the same hook my coat had been hanging on. I registered, with a strange little jolt, that he must have hung it there himself last night. Carefully. Like it mattered.

"Courthouse is a fifteen minute walk," he said. "Or I've got a car that runs about sixty percent of the time. Your call."

"We're walking."

"Yeah, that tracks."

I caught myself doing the math on the walk. Fifteen minutes there. However long inside. Fifteen minutes back to my apartment.

If I moved fast, I could still make it to the office by ten. Still salvage some version of a normal day out of this.

I've built my whole life around math like that. Minutes accounted for. Contingencies planned. It's the only thing that's ever made me feel like the ground wasn't about to shift under me.

Except the ground had already shifted. I was just doing the math anyway, because it was easier than sitting with the alternative.

The dog turned out to be a lanky brown mutt named Waffles. Jax dropped him at a neighbor's door with a speed that suggested this wasn't his first short-notice favor.

I watched him crouch to ruffle the dog's ears, murmuring something too quiet to catch. Then he straightened like the moment hadn't happened at all.

It struck me as odd, how gentle that was. How unbothered. Like taking care of something small and dependent came easier to him than taking care of himself.

Outside, the morning was gray and getting grayer. I walked fast, the way I walk into every meeting I've ever been late for. Jax kept pace beside me without seeming to try.

"Quick question," he said.

"No."

"You don't know the question yet."

"It's about last night. The answer's still no."

"It was going to be about your coffee order, actually. But okay, noted, you're touchy."

"I'm not touchy. I'm processing."

"Sure. What's your coffee order?"

"Black. No sugar."

"Of course it is." He said it like it confirmed something he'd already suspected. I didn't ask what.

We came up on a crosswalk where a street performer had a folding table set up with a keyboard on it, the cheap plastic kind. He was playing something slow and a little clumsy, missing a note here and there.

Jax went still beside me.

Not tense. Still. Like he'd stopped breathing without deciding to.

"You okay?" I said.

"Yeah. Fine." He started walking before the light even changed. I had to take two quick steps to catch up.

"That was weird."

"What was?"

"You just froze. At a guy playing keyboard on the street."

"I didn't freeze."

"You did. Full stop, mid-sentence, like someone hit pause on you."

"I was checking my phone."

He hadn't taken his phone out. I noticed and filed it away, the way I file away seating charts and vendor complaints. Information I wasn't ready to use yet.

That made two things now. The hand tapping something precise against his own leg back at the apartment. And this.

Small things. Probably nothing. I'm the kind of person who notices small things and turns them into theories before I have any actual evidence, and I told myself that's all this was.

A theory with nothing behind it yet.

The courthouse came into view a block later. Squat and gray, a flag hanging limp out front in the no-wind. Something in my chest unclenched slightly at the sight of it.

A building meant a process. A process meant an answer.

"Okay," I said. "We go in, explain there was a mistake, ask for the fastest option. Annulment, not divorce. There's a difference and it matters for—"

"Your fiancé. Yeah. I got it."

Something in his voice went flatter. I glanced at him but didn't push. I've learned when to leave a door closed.

We reached the steps. A woman in a cardigan was taping a sheet of paper to the glass doors.

My stomach dropped before I'd even read it.

"No," I said. "No, no, no."

The sign read: CLOSED FOR STAFF TRAINING. REOPENS TOMORROW 9 AM.

"You have got to be kidding me." I pressed my palm flat against the glass, like I could will it open through sheer frustration. Inside, the lobby sat dark and empty. Chairs stacked against one wall. A desk lamp glowing over nothing.

"Well," Jax said, "on the bright side, you get one more day of being my wife before anyone can revoke it."

"That is not the bright side."

"It's a little bit the bright side."

I looked at the dark lobby through the glass and felt the day's whole shape rearrange itself. No annulment today. No quiet fix before anyone noticed.

Just one more day of being married to a man I'd known for less than twenty-four hours, whose hands moved like they were keeping a secret from the rest of him.

I turned to snap something back at Jax and stopped, because my phone was buzzing again. Insistent.

This time it wasn't Julian's name on the screen.

It was Priya's.

Priya: Where ARE you. Your mom is here. She's asking why you never came home last night and I have literally nothing to tell her.