Chapter 24: Dinner She Never Accepted

I did not answer him in words.

I got out of the narrow bed with a sheet around me.

I found my red dress on the floor.

The folded paper was still in the pocket.

"Willa," Rory said, sitting up. "You don't have to."

"I know I don't."

I carried the paper down the stairs in my bare feet.

He came behind me, pulling on his trousers.

The memorial room was warm with one small flame.

I opened the annulment petition once, so he could see his own name on it.

I showed him the line where I was meant to sign.

Then I held the corner to my mother's candle.

It caught slowly, brown and then orange.

I dropped it into the silver dish on the table and watched it curl.

"That was your whole settlement," Rory said.

"I have a settlement. It's in a bank."

I turned around.

"I don't need a paper to be free, Rory. I needed to know I could leave. Now I know it."

"And?"

"And I'm staying."

His face did something I had not seen it do before.

It simply came apart, and he put his hand over his mouth.

"Say it again," he said, through his fingers.

"I'm staying, you idiot. I would like a husband I can keep."

He crossed the room and lifted me clean off the floor, sheet and all.

His laugh was shaky against my neck.

The ashes in the dish went gray.

The candle burned on beside my parents' photographs, and I let him hold me until I stopped shaking too.

On Sunday it snowed.

It began in the afternoon, fine and dry, and by six the whole street was white.

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