My Father Married Me to the Man I Watched Shoot Someone, and the Only Witness Is His Wife novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Lock on the Inside

At the lake house she finds a steno pad she did not put on her nightstand, he sets his own terms through the door, and at 3 a.m. she follows him down to the ice.

The lake house stood on a shelf of rock above Lake Superior, forty minutes up the North Shore road, past a gate with two men in a truck.

It was stone and dark timber, with a long porch, and every window faced the ice.

Xander cut the engine in the drive.

"Your things came this afternoon," he said.

"Ilija's wife packed them."

"I don't think she did," I said.

"No," he said.

"It was two of the men."

I almost laughed.

He came around and opened my door, and I got out into wind so cold it hurt my teeth.

My fingers would not work.

I fumbled the buttons of my coat, and the shawl over my wedding dress, and he watched me fail.

Then he stepped close, took the coat by the collar, and slid it off my shoulders.

He did it the way you would help a stranger at a coat check.

His knuckles brushed my neck.

I stood very still.

"Thank you," I said.

"Inside," he said.

The house was warm and smelled of woodsmoke and old cedar.

A woman I did not know took my shawl and vanished.

A fire burned in a stone hearth the size of a doorway.

"Upstairs," he said.

"Second door on the left.

"There is a lock on the inside.

"I put the bolt on myself this morning."

"This morning, before the wedding?" I asked.

"Yes."

"You thought I'd ask for it."

"I thought a woman marrying a stranger would want a door," he said.

I looked at him.

He looked back, with nothing I could use.

"Ilija's men stay at the gate," he said.

"You are not a prisoner.

"You are also not to walk to town yet, and you will not take my car.

"I sleep at the end of the hall."

"And if you want me?" I said.

"I did not mean it the way it sounded," he said.

"If I want you, I will say so in daylight, and you may refuse."

"How did you mean it?"

A muscle moved in his jaw.

"I meant that I will not come through your door," he said.

I went up.

The room was large and plain, with a bed under a sloped timber ceiling and a window that showed nothing but black glass and the pale edge of the ice.

The bolt on the door was new brass.

I shot it and leaned on the wood and breathed.

My bag lay on a chest at the foot of the bed.

On the nightstand, squared to the edge, lay a steno pad and a sharpened pencil.

I had not put them there.

I did not carry a pencil.

I opened the pad.

The first page was blank.

I turned over the cover and found, in small square handwriting, one line:

If you will write it down, write it here.

I sat on the bed in my wedding dress and looked at it for a long time.

I did not sleep.

At seven I came downstairs in jeans and a sweater and found a long table in a kitchen with a window onto the lake.

Baba Stana sat at the head of it with a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of tea, and nobody else was there.

She looked up and turned a hearing aid on.

"The bride eats?" she said.

"Yes," I said.

"Sit."

I sat.

She pushed a plate of bread and plum jam toward me.

"My grandson is a hard man," she said.

"I know."

"He is a good man who is hard," Baba said.

"This happens.

"The harbor makes it so."

"He didn't say good morning," I said.

"He will say it tomorrow."

She patted my hand.

Her fingers were knotted like old rope.

"I knew your mother," she said.

"She taught my youngest nephew his letters.

"She would have hated this."

"Yes," I said.

"Eat," said Baba.

I ate.

Through the window I could see a long stretch of rock running down to the shore, and ice lying out on the lake in white plates.

Xander was standing at the end of the rock, in a black coat, alone.

He had been standing there, I realized, since before light.

The old woman followed my eyes and turned her hearing aid off again.

I wrote in the steno pad, in my own shorthand: Baba says, the harbor makes it so.

Then, because it was true and nobody could read my shorthand but me, I wrote underneath it: He didn't look at the water in the car.

He's looking at it now.

That night, at three in the morning, I woke to a door shutting down the hall.

Boots went down the stairs.

The front door opened and closed.

I got up, found my coat, slid the bolt, and followed him out into the dark.

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