Back With Baby, Ex Regrets Deeply novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Clerk's Office
My fiance walks into City Hall forty minutes late with my stepsister in my dead mother's earrings and dumps me in front of the line; I take the earrings back and say yes to a stranger's money, and at the Edinburgh registry office the groom is the man from the kirkyard wall, pretending he's never met me.
Dorian was forty minutes late to our wedding, and when he finally walked into City Hall, my stepsister was holding his hand.
I was fourth in line at the City Clerk's counter.
I had on a cream dress I'd bought for ninety dollars and my mother's pearl earrings were supposed to be my something old.
I couldn't find them that morning.
I'd decided they were in a coat pocket somewhere and let it go.
The couple in front of us had a toddler in a tiny bow tie.
The couple behind me kept asking if I wanted to go ahead of them.
"He's parking," I said, for the third time.
Then the elevator opened and Dorian came down the hall in his good navy suit.
Laurel was with him.
She had on pale pink, like a bridesmaid.
And in her ears were two pearl drops on thin gold hooks.
My mother's.
I knew them.
My mother wore them to every opening she ever had, and she wore them in the hospital the week she died.
"Faye," Dorian said.
He didn't lower his voice.
He'd never once lowered his voice for me.
"I'm not doing this."
The toddler in the bow tie looked up at him.
"You're late," I said. "We can still make the eleven o'clock."
"You're not listening." He let go of Laurel's hand to spread his. "Your dad's company is done. Kincaid Lines is calling the leases. There's nothing left, Faye."
"I'm not marrying Odell Marine."
"You're not marrying anybody." He laughed, short and embarrassed for me. "Without your father's name you're a girl who draws bunnies for a living. I've got a future. I'm not starting it in debt."
The clerk had stopped typing.
The woman behind me had her hand over her mouth.
Laurel stepped up beside him and slipped her arm through his.
"Don't cry here," she said kindly. "People are looking."
"Why are you wearing my mother's earrings?"
She touched one.
"Dad said I could borrow them."
"They were in my jewelry box."
"Well." She smiled at the couple with the toddler. "You weren't going to need anything nice today, were you?"
Somebody in the line made a small sound.
I looked down at my left hand.
Dorian had picked that ring out himself, a round diamond on a thin band, and told me twice what it cost.
I twisted it off.
It came hard over the knuckle, and I didn't care.
There was a cup of pencils on the clerk's counter.
I dropped the ring in with them.
It rattled all the way down.
"Ma'am," the clerk said faintly.
"He'll want it back," I said. "He has a future to pay for."
Then I turned to Laurel and held out my hand, palm up.
"What?"
"The earrings."
"Faye, honestly. Not in front of..."
"In front of everyone," I said. "Take them out."
She looked at Dorian.
Dorian looked at the floor.
The couple behind me were filming now, and I didn't stop them.
Laurel's face went blotchy pink under her makeup.
She unhooked the left one.
Then the right.
She dropped them into my palm.
I closed my hand.
"Congratulations," I said. "You can have the man. You don't get my mother."
I walked out past the line.
The woman with the toddler touched my arm as I went by.
Outside the brick plaza was gray and windy, and pigeons were walking around.
I sat on the low wall by the steps in my ninety-dollar dress.
My hands were shaking so hard I put the earrings in one at a time and stabbed myself twice.
Then I called my father.
He picked up on the first ring.
He'd been waiting.
"Faye. Sweetheart. Is it done?"
"Is what done?"
A pause.
"The ceremony. I'm sorry I couldn't be there, the bank..."
"He didn't marry me."
Another pause, longer.
"Oh, honey."
He didn't ask why.
I noticed that later.
"The man in Edinburgh," I said. "Kincaid. The one who wants a wife instead of forty million dollars."
"Faye, you don't have to..."
"You said if I said yes, the debt goes away. Your company lives. The crews keep their jobs."
"That's the arrangement."
I watched Dorian and Laurel come out the side door and hurry toward the parking garage without looking at the steps.
Her hair blew across his face.
He laughed and pushed it away.
"Tell Kincaid yes," I said.
Eight days later I stood in a stone registry office in Edinburgh with rain running down the tall windows.
I had on the same cream dress.
I'd had it cleaned.
My father sat behind me in a borrowed pew, already on the phone with his bank.
The registrar smiled at me over her glasses and said the groom had just arrived.
I heard his steps on the old floor.
Unhurried.
Then he stopped beside me and turned, and I forgot to breathe.
I knew that face.
The broken nose. The gray eyes. The low, careful way he stood.
Six years ago, the night after we buried my mother, a stranger had found me on the kirkyard wall in the rain and put his coat around my shoulders.
We'd talked until the sky went pale.
I'd drawn him on the back of my mother's funeral program and given it to him because I had nothing else.
He looked at me now like a man looking at a contract.
"Miss Odell," Alistair Kincaid said. "I don't believe we've met."
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