He Sent Me Overseas to Marry Her, I'm Staying Overseas to Never See Him Again novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Under the Arches

Inside the box was a thin gold ring with one small pearl.

It was worn almost flat on one side.

"Gran's," he said. "Grandad gave it her in 1970. She took it off in the autumn. Said her knuckles had had enough of it."

"She gave you her ring."

"She threw it at me. In January. Told me to stop being slow." He looked up at me from the floor. "I'm not quick. I'm..."

"Thorough," I said. "I know."

"Will you marry me? Here. Under the trains."

I knelt down on the brick in front of him, so we were the same height.

"Yes," I said.

He put the ring on my finger.

It fit.

Peggy had known my size since the day she gave me a needle.

We were married on the second Saturday in June.

The crew pushed the benches back against the walls.

The long cutting table stayed in the middle, covered in white cloths and jam jars of sweet peas.

The racks were full of cases and half-built trunks, and nobody tidied them away.

The green doors stood wide open to the lane.

Half the lane came anyway, and stood on the cobbles with their phones up.

My aunt flew in from Ohio.

She said the arch was the strangest place she'd ever been to a wedding, and then she cried through all of it.

I wore a plain ivory dress with short sleeves and no lace.

I'd drawn it myself, and two of the bench workers had sewn it at night without letting me see.

Oliver wore a navy suit.

He'd had it made.

It fit across the shoulders, the first suit in his life that did.

Peggy walked me down the aisle between the stitching benches.

She came up to my shoulder.

She held my arm like she was guiding a blade.

"Don't trip," she said. "It's a long way down the arch, and I'm not carrying you."

"I won't trip."

"You did a terrible handle once."

"Peggy."

"Not bad for a first," she said, and squeezed my arm, and kept walking.

Oliver was waiting at the far end, by the stove, with the old cutter beside him as his best man.

The old cutter had his three-piece suit on again and a sweet pea in his buttonhole.

He was crying before we'd got halfway.

The registrar was a tidy woman in a gray jacket who had never married anybody under a railway before.

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