He Had a Wife I Never Knew, So I Married Her Brother novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Lawyer at Dinner
A lawyer rings the bell on a Friday night and calls Linnea the mistress. She walks out with the marriage certificate on her phone.
The lawyer rang our bell at six on Friday, while three of my neighbors were carrying groceries up the stairs.
I opened the door with a dish towel still in my hand.
Behind me, Gavin was browning chicken thighs in the one good pan.
The man on the landing wore a gray overcoat and held a folder against his chest.
"Ms. Marsden?" he said. "I'm sorry to do this at your door."
"Do what?"
"I represent a family that needs you to know something about Mr. Ludlow."
The neighbors on the stairs stopped climbing.
"You are living with a married man," the lawyer said. "Legally, that makes you his mistress."
I laughed, because it was stupid.
He didn't laugh.
He opened the folder and held out one page, and I took it because my hand was already reaching.
It was a marriage certificate from Franklin County.
The groom was Gavin Thomas Ludlow.
The bride was Philippa Anne Roswell.
The date was six years ago, in June.
I read it twice, and the second time the words would not stay in rows.
I had been with Gavin for three years.
We had gone to the county fair on our first date, and he had split a funnel cake with me to save a dollar.
"He has a wife," the lawyer said. "She is alive, and she is not divorced from him."
Something moved fast behind me.
Gavin came through the kitchen with the spatula still in his fist and stepped between me and the door.
He did that everywhere.
He did it when a bike came down the sidewalk at me, and when a drunk stumbled into our table at the diner.
He had done it so many times that I had stopped noticing, and now I noticed.
"You've got the wrong address," Gavin said to the lawyer. "Get off my landing."
"Mr. Ludlow, I have the registry copy."
"Get off."
Gavin took the page out of my hand, folded it once, and shut the door in the man's face.
The latch clicked.
On the stairs, one neighbor whispered to another, and I heard the word mistress.
Gavin turned around with his smile already on.
It was the crooked one, the one that said I was the only safe thing in his life.
"Lin," he said. "Baby. Sit down."
"Is it real?"
"It's not what it looks like."
"Is it real, Gavin?"
He rubbed the back of his neck.
"It's a paper thing. Her father's money. Her family tied the company to the marriage, and if I leave her, I lose everything I've worked for."
"You told me you had no family."
"I don't. I have a signature."
He said it softly.
"She and I haven't lived together in years. When her old man dies, it all ends. I didn't tell you because you would have walked out."
I looked at the stove.
The thighs were smoking.
He walked back and turned the heat down without being asked, because he never burned anything.
For three years he had cooked every night.
For three years we had shopped from his coupon binder, the fat blue one on the kitchen shelf that I wasn't allowed to touch because it was his system.
We had saved thirty-one thousand dollars in our house fund, and most of it was mine.
I had skipped haircuts and a trip to see my aunt.
I had bought my coat at a thrift shop and been proud of it.
"Whose truck is that?" I said. "The one you drive."
"A guy at work lets me borrow it."
"What guy?"
"Lin."
"What guy, Gavin?"
He didn't answer.
He took a plate down and began to serve the chicken.
That was what made my skin go cold.
He was plating dinner.
I took my phone out of my back pocket, and he did not stop me, because he thought I was texting Marcy.
The lawyer had left a second copy of the certificate on the floor by the door, slid under it.
I picked it up and took a photo of every line.
Then I went into the bedroom and pulled my duffel from under the bed.
Gavin came and stood in the bedroom doorway with a plate in each hand.
"You're not leaving over a technicality."
"Move."
"I did all of this for us."
"Move."
He put the plates on the dresser, very carefully, and stood in front of the door with his arms out.
The shield again.
The thing I had loved most about him was now standing between me and the way out.
"Gavin," I said. "My neighbors are on the other side of that wall, and they heard the word mistress. If I scream, they will come in."
He stepped aside.
I walked out past the plates, past the pan, past the binder on its shelf.
On my way down, the woman from 2B looked at me and looked away.
At the bus stop, my hands wouldn't stop shaking, so I put them in my pockets and found my pill box.
It was the long plastic kind, seven little doors, the one Gavin refilled every Sunday night so I'd never forget.
He always stood and watched me swallow that day's pill.
I opened Friday's door, and it was empty, because I had taken it at breakfast.
I opened Saturday's and looked at the small white pill.
I couldn't remember the last time I had bled.
I tracked the dates while the bus came and went.
Nine days late.
I had never been late in my life.
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