He Swapped Himself Out at the Altar, So I Married the Honest Stranger novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Six Men in Black
Hoyt lines up six strangers in identical suits and stays out of the line. June goes down the row by touch, picks the one man who whispers a warning, marries him on the lawn, and learns from his card that Step Four is don't let her leave the lawn.
Six men in black suits stood in a row on the lawn, and one of them was supposed to be my husband.
Two hundred guests sat on white chairs facing Lake Superior.
Half of them held up their phones.
I have prosopagnosia, which means I can't recognize a face, not my mother's, not Hoyt's.
I know people by other things.
A voice, a walk, a hum, how someone holds a coffee cup.
For five years Hoyt had swapped himself out for strangers to prove I couldn't tell.
He did it at a bakery, in a dentist's waiting room, once at his own father's birthday dinner.
I laughed every time, because Hoyt said I was too sensitive if I didn't.
That morning he had texted me: "Whatever happens on the lawn, I'm the one who taps twice. Trust the game. Love you."
The tap was ours.
When Hoyt takes my hand, his thumb presses the back of it twice, slowly, with a pause in between.
I told him that years ago, when I was proud of knowing him.
Cecelia pinned my veil in the lodge doorway.
She was my maid of honor and Hoyt's oldest friend, and she was officiating because she had gotten ordained online as our wedding gift.
When she bent to the pins, the gold chain at her neck swung out with a ring on it.
She tucked it back under her dress.
It was her grandmother's ring, she had told me once, and I had never asked again.
"Just go with your gut, Junie," she said. "Everybody's going to laugh, but in the good way."
"Hoyt promised he'd be at the end of the row," I said.
"Then he'll be at the end of the row." She squeezed my shoulders. "Go."
The rule of the game was that the bride finds her groom by touch, and nobody speaks.
I walked down the line with my bouquet in my left hand and my right hand out.
The first man's hand was big and dry, and he didn't tap.
All six of them smelled like Hoyt.
Somebody had sprayed the whole row with his cologne.
The second man's hand was damp and stiff.
The third man took my hand and pressed the back of it twice, fast, one tap right after the other.
A signet ring sat cold against my knuckles, the same ring Hoyt wears on his right hand.
The guests said "Aww."
Hoyt's tap is slow.
This was a tap somebody had learned from a description.
I stood in front of the third man and understood that Hoyt was not in the row at all.
The fourth man shook.
The fifth dropped my hand as soon as he had it.
The sixth man's palm was warm and rough, with a ridge of callus across the base of his fingers and a seam of scar along his thumb.
He didn't tap.
He bent his head toward my veil and whispered, "Ma'am, I think I'm in the wrong line. I was told this was a photo."
He was the only man of the six who had broken the rule, and he had broken it to tell me the truth.
So I held on to him and turned to the guests.
"This one," I said.
The lawn laughed.
A man in the third row shouted, "She got the wrong guy!"
Phones went up all the way to the back.
Cecelia's smile slipped for half a second. "Are you sure, June?"
"I'm sure."
I walked him up the aisle by the hand.
At the arch, he leaned down again.
"This is a joke on you," he said quietly. "I'm not him."
"I know," I said. "Say I do and I'll explain. Please."
He looked at the phones, then at me, and I felt him decide.
Cecelia read the vows from her phone, her voice thin and fast.
She got to "Do you take this woman" and stopped, because the groom had no name on her card.
"Calvin Lundin," the man beside me said. "I do."
"June?" Cecelia said.
"I do."
"Then by the power..."
Cecelia's eyes went to the lodge door.
It banged open.
Hoyt came out in a gray suit with his arms wide and his phone already up.
"Gotcha, Junie!" he called. "Five years and you still can't find me!"
The guests roared.
Gene Sandberg, his father, laughed in the front row with a hand on his knee.
"You weren't in the line," I said.
Hoyt kept smiling as he came down the aisle. "That's the whole point of the game."
"You told two hundred people I'd marry whoever I touched." I lifted Calvin's hand in mine. "I touched him. Cecelia, finish it."
Cecelia didn't move.
The laughter on the lawn got thinner, then stopped.
Beside me Calvin put his free hand into his jacket pocket, felt something there, and pulled out a folded index card.
He read it silently.
Then he read it again, aloud, in a flat voice that carried to the last row.
"Step one: say I do. Step two: Cecelia takes the ring back. Step three: June cries."
He looked up at Hoyt.
"Step four: don't let her leave the lawn."
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