I Dumped My Groom and Married My Childhood Crush in 30 Minutes novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Boathouse

Conway takes Annalise home and sets terms she can end any day; Tobias arrives at midnight with his mother's car at the curb.

The paper ring did not fit my finger.

Conway pushed it as far as my knuckle and held it there, and I started laughing and crying at the same time.

"By the power vested in me," the judge said, a little breathless, "you are husband and wife."

Nobody in the hall moved.

Then Hattie, in the back row in her bridesmaid dress, stood on her pew and started clapping alone.

A few people joined her, then a few more, and then a lot of them.

Tobias shoved past the judge's table and grabbed my elbow.

"You're not doing this to me," he said. "Not in front of my mother."

Conway took his wrist, calmly, and lifted Tobias's hand off my arm.

He did not squeeze.

He just held it in the air until Tobias understood he could not pull it back.

"Let her go," Conway said.

"Who the hell are you?"

"The man she called."

Reese held up his phone to catch it, and Hattie walked over and knocked it out of his hand.

It skidded across the floor under a pew.

"Oops," she said.

I looked for Eleanor.

She was still standing in the front row, the wet patch on her dress spreading, her eyes on Conway's face.

"Eleanor?" I said. "I'm sorry. You were so kind to me."

She blinked and turned toward me, and her face smoothed over.

"We'll talk Monday, honey," she said. "You've had a terrible shock."

Then she picked up her purse and walked out through the side door without looking at her son.

I should have thought about that.

I didn't.

Conway put his jacket around my shoulders, and we walked out of the hall the way I had come in, down the aisle, between a hundred and forty people with their phones out.

Nobody said a word.

Some of them smiled.

Outside, the afternoon was bright and ordinary.

His truck was parked crooked across two spaces with the door still open.

"You left it running," I said.

"I know."

He helped me up into the passenger seat, gathering my skirt so it would not catch in the door.

I took off my veil and held it in my lap.

We drove out of Marlow Point with the lake on our left, and neither of us spoke for six miles.

Then I said, "You didn't ask me a single question."

"I figured you'd tell me."

"I just married you, Conway."

"I was there."

"You should have a lot of questions."

He glanced at me, then back at the road.

"I have one," he said. "Do you want me to take you to Hattie's, or to mine?"

I looked at the paper ring.

"Yours."

His place was at the end of a gravel road on the north shore: a long boathouse with a green door and a small yard full of hulls under tarps.

He owned the yard.

He said it like it was a small thing, and I knew by the size of the dock that it wasn't.

He unlocked the door and stepped back to let me go first.

Inside there was one big room with a kitchen along one wall, a woodstove, and a bed on a platform by the water windows.

It smelled like cedar and coffee.

"Here are my terms," he said, standing by the door with his hands at his sides.

"Terms?"

"You can end this any day you want. I'll sign whatever you put in front of me. You don't owe me a single thing for today."

"Conway."

"I'll sleep on the couch. You take the bed. If you want a lock on the door, I'll put one on tomorrow."

I set the veil on the counter.

"Now mine," I said.

"Okay."

"No speeches. No pity. And you don't get to rescue me from anything unless I ask."

He almost smiled.

"You called me," he said. "That was you asking."

"Then don't do it again without a phone call."

"Deal."

He made me eggs at four in the afternoon, and I ate every bite standing at the counter in my wedding dress.

Afterward he handed me a clean shirt that smelled like cedar and pointed me to the bathroom.

I stood in there for a long time with the water running.

I kept looking at the paper ring on the sink.

It had a crease across the middle where he had kept it folded in a wallet for nineteen years.

I did not ask why.

I was afraid of the answer.

I slept in his bed with the lake going dark behind the glass, and I slept better than I had in a month.

At midnight someone pounded on the green door.

I sat up.

Conway was already on his feet, already at the window.

He didn't say anything for a moment.

"It's your ex," he said. "He's drunk."

Through the glass I could see headlights across the road.

A silver sedan idled at the end of the gravel, with a woman in the passenger seat I knew.

Tobias had brought his mother.

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