Chapter 24: She Is Seen

I picked up the pen first.

Stuart had asked me to, in a whisper, while the officiant was still turning the ledger around.

*You sign first,* he had said. *Everything else in this marriage that I signed before you, I got wrong.*

The page was clean.

There was a line for each of us and nothing else, no clause and no condition.

I wrote my name slowly, in my small neat hand.

*Willa Lothrop Ashcroft.*

The ink shone in the morning sun.

It was the first time in my life I had put my whole name in a place where people would read it.

I handed Stuart the pen.

His hand shook, and he signed below mine, and a drop of water fell on the page and blurred the last letter.

"That's not ink," the officiant said.

"It is not," Stuart said.

The officiant blotted it with great gentleness.

"I now pronounce you married," he said. "You may kiss your wife."

Stuart put both hands on my face.

"May I?"

"We're already married," I said. "Yes."

He kissed me, and the pier shook with the applause of twenty people and a baker with a spoon.

Jack woke up in the stroller and yelled.

Flora, who had slept through all of it, opened her eyes and yelled louder.

"They are very good critics," Stuart said against my mouth.

We ate on long tables set up on the grass behind the bakery.

The baker had cut the rye loaf into forty thick slices, and there was a jar of butter every four feet.

I carried Flora on my hip and Jack stayed with his father, and nobody told me to sit down.

When the cake had been eaten, Stuart stood on a chair.

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