I Didn't Marry Him, I Married The One He Hated novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Do You Take This Woman

Linnea marries Magnus on Friday while Trevor and Shelby burst in to accuse him of the crash; Trevor's mother Greta arrives afterward and orders them to Sunday dinner.

On Friday the clerk printed my new birth certificate in ten minutes.

I stood at the same counter with my passport in my hand and said please, and she said certainly, and slid it across with a stamp.

In four months Trevor had never once mentioned that option.

I didn't let myself think about why.

Magnus was waiting by the door of the small room down the hall, in a gray suit that fit him a little too tight across the shoulders.

He had shaved the beard down to stubble.

"You came," he said.

"I told you I would."

"People tell me a lot of things." He held the door. "I brought a witness."

His witness was the old foreman from the yard, a thin man in his seventies with oil worked into the creases of his knuckles.

Mine was a coworker from the clinic, who had taken a long lunch and brought a bouquet of grocery-store carnations.

"I'm not saying this is a good idea," she whispered, handing them over. "I'm saying you look great."

The judge was a tired woman with a stack of folders and a ten-minute window.

She read the first lines of the ceremony off a card.

I stood next to a man I had known for three days, and my hands were cold.

Magnus stood next to me and looked at the wall.

"Do you, Magnus Ekdahl," the judge said.

The door opened behind us.

I did not need to turn around to know whose footsteps those were.

"Stop," Trevor said. "Stop. Linnea, stop this."

He was out of breath from the stairs and favoring his bad knee.

Shelby came in behind him with her hair pushed back off her face for the first time since I'd met her.

I had never seen the whole scar.

It ran from her left temple along the jaw, thin and white and straight, and ended near the corner of her mouth.

"Look at it," Shelby said. Her voice shook. "Please, Linnea. Just look."

The judge lowered her card.

"Sir, this is a private ceremony."

"This man put it there," Trevor said, pointing at Magnus. "Eight years ago, on Skyline Parkway. He was drunk, and he put my father's truck through a guardrail with the two of us inside it."

Nobody in the room moved.

The foreman looked at the floor.

My coworker said very quietly, "Oh, honey."

Magnus did not defend himself.

He did not even turn his head.

"Is it true?" I asked him.

"Part of it." His voice was steady. "I was convicted. I served my time."

"You see?" Trevor said. "He admits it."

"That's not what he said," I said.

Trevor blinked.

"I asked if it was true. He said part of it." I turned to Shelby. "I'm sorry about your face. I mean that. I'm sorry it happened, and I'm sorry you've lived with it."

Shelby's eyes filled.

She really did cry.

That was what bothered me, even then.

"But you tore up my birth certificate," I said, "and you did it on purpose, and I was standing there."

"Linnea, that's not fair."

"You asked for the folder. You pulled it in half with both hands."

"It was an accident!"

"Then it was an accident that I got a new one in ten minutes," I said. "Trevor never told me I could."

Trevor opened his mouth and closed it again.

The judge looked from him to me.

"Ma'am," she said, "do you want this man removed?"

"No." I stepped closer to Magnus, close enough that our sleeves touched. "I want her to finish the card."

The judge sighed and lifted it.

"Do you, Magnus Ekdahl, take this woman."

"I do."

"Do you, Linnea Nygren, take this man."

"I do."

"Wait," Trevor said, and his voice cracked. "My mother's coming. She's in the car. She's going to stop this."

"Then she's late," the judge said. "By the authority of the state of Minnesota, I pronounce you married."

Magnus slid a plain gold band on my finger.

It was warm from his pocket.

My coworker cheered once and then covered her mouth.

Trevor was crying now, too, and I felt nothing about it.

We signed on the line, and the foreman signed, and my coworker signed, and the judge stamped the page.

When we reached the hallway, a woman in a gray cardigan was walking toward us with her pearls in one fist.

She was small and silver-haired and very straight.

Trevor's mother.

She did not look at me.

She looked at Magnus.

"You think a piece of paper gets you the yard," she said. "I will be at that party, Magnus. And I will want proof that this marriage is real before I give up one share."

"You'll have it," Magnus said.

"Sunday. Six o'clock, at my table." She finally turned to me, and her eyes went over my carnations and my cheap coat. "Bring her. I'd like to see what kind of woman marries a convict in four days."

"The kind who read the whole story," I said.

She touched her pearls and walked past us into the room where her son was still crying.

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