Sweetheart Wife novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Thirty Days

The groom is Jonas, the man she once pulled from a burning car, and he offers to pay her debt for thirty days as his wife.

We stood on the courthouse steps in the thin morning sun, and I held the marriage certificate in both hands.

"You're him," I said.

"I'm him."

"You're the man in the Jeep."

"I was the man in the Jeep," Jonas said. "You were the girl who pulled me out."

He said it flatly, with no thanks in it at all.

He was thirty-one now, I did the math, and he had been twenty-four then, with a good-humored face I remembered from the party.

This face did not look good-humored.

It looked like a door that had been locked from the inside for a long time.

"I have to ask you something," I said.

"Ask."

"Did you plan this?"

Something moved behind his eyes and was gone.

"You walked into the room," he said. "You picked up the pen."

That was true, and I hated that it was true.

"The clerk said you were expecting me."

"I was expecting my wife," he said.

"I put in the application weeks ago, with the name left blank."

"The clerk had a list, and I imagine she filled in the one she thought she saw."

It sounded reasonable.

It sounded like exactly the kind of thing I wanted to believe.

I did not believe it for one second, but I was too tired to take it apart.

"Then we undo it," I said. "Today."

"It's not that fast."

He rested one hand on the stone rail.

"You can't simply tear it up. An annulment is filed and a hearing is set."

"The paper says thirty days at the soonest."

"Thirty days."

"Until then you are legally Mrs. Middleton, whether you like it or not."

I closed my eyes.

When I opened them he was still there, and he was watching my face with an attention I had not felt in seven years.

"Where are you staying?" he asked.

"A motel."

"With what money?"

I did not answer, and he nodded as though I had.

"I heard what Delilah Habersham said at the wake," he said. "It's all over the Battery. Three hundred thousand by tomorrow at five."

"You were at the wake?"

"I have friends who were."

That did not feel like an answer either.

My heart began to knock against my ribs.

"What do you want, Jonas?"

"A bargain," he said.

"Thirty days. You live in my house as my wife, and you act like it when we have company."

"I pay Delilah Habersham's three hundred thousand tomorrow, before her deadline, in full, with a receipt."

"Why would you do that?"

"Because my grandmother is seventy-four, and she wants to see me married before she dies."

He said it so smoothly that I almost laughed.

"That is the worst reason I have ever heard."

"It's the one I have," Jonas said.

I looked at his hand on the rail.

The scar ran across the back of it and up his forearm, glossy and pulled tight.

The sight of it made my stomach turn over.

I had smelled that skin burning.

I had dragged him by the collar through broken glass with my own hands cut open.

Nobody had ever told me whether he lived.

For seven years I had not known, and I had not been allowed to ask.

"You have thirty seconds," he said. "After that I take my offer back."

"You haven't even asked me if I want to live with you."

"Do you want to live in a motel?"

"No," I said.

"Then say yes."

I should have said no.

If I had been wise, I would have put the certificate in the nearest trash can.

I would have walked down Meeting Street with my head high and my three hundred and twelve dollars.

But I was twenty-six, and I was tired of being wise and poor.

"Yes," I said. "Thirty days. And nobody touches me unless I say so."

His eyes dropped for a moment to my mouth and came back up.

"Agreed," Jonas said, in a voice that had gone lower.

He opened the door of a black truck at the curb and held it.

We drove across the Ravenel Bridge with neither of us talking, and the harbor flashed silver below us.

His house sat on a bluff in Mount Pleasant behind a stand of live oaks.

It was brick, wide and old, with a long porch and a garden going gold at the edges.

An old woman stood on the porch with a cane in one hand and a dish towel over her shoulder.

She had a long white braid and sharp blue eyes, and she had been standing there, I realized, watching the road.

She looked at me, and her whole face opened up.

"There she is," she said. "Willa Habersham."

"About time, sweetheart."

I had never met her in my life.

She already knew my first name, and the ink on my marriage certificate was not yet dry.

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