I Married the Don for the Debt, and My Husband Walked In Alive novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Band Stopped
At her wedding reception the band stops mid-song and her drowned husband says 'Congratulations, darling'; she drops his ring in his glass.
The band stopped in the middle of the second chorus.
I felt it in my feet first, the whole floor of the hall going still under two hundred people.
A man stood in the open doorway with a glass of champagne raised.
He was thinner than I remembered, and tanned, and he wore a linen shirt open at the throat.
"Congratulations, darling," said Julien.
He had drowned in the lake in March.
I had buried an empty casket for him.
I had worn black to his funeral Mass, and now I was standing in an ivory lace dress, married four hours to someone else.
The hand on my back did not move.
My new husband had held me there since the first notes of our dance, flat and warm, his thumb pressed to the base of my spine.
He had not let go when the music died, and his fingers tightened once through the lace, a promise that he would be there when I turned around.
Rafe Castellane stood a head taller than me, in a black suit, with grey at his temples and a nose that had been broken once.
Nobody in New Orleans said his name above a murmur.
I had said "I do" to him in front of a priest that afternoon, and I had meant every word of the paper behind it.
Eight weeks ago, at the repast after Julien's six-month Mass, he had found me alone in the church-hall kitchen and told me what my husband owed him.
One million, one hundred thousand dollars, in markers, and a dead man's debt falls on the widow's house.
Then he offered me a year, with the markers paid the day I said yes and the bakery mine.
I had said yes in the time it took to pour his coffee.
Julien's mother had begged me for a week to take that deal.
Now I looked for her.
Odette Beaumont sat in the front row at the table of honor, in her church hat and white gloves.
When Julien walked in, two hundred chairs scraped back as the members of the Bayou Rose Society half rose.
Odette did not stand.
She sat with her hands folded on her bag and looked at her son.
Julien smiled at me across the hall.
It was the smile that had made me say yes to him at twenty-five, crooked on the left.
"You look beautiful, Camille," he said.
"You look alive."
My voice came out steady, and I was proud of that for about a second.
A woman near the bar began to cry.
Somebody said "Lord, Lord" and crossed herself.
Julien came a step farther into the hall, and four of Rafe's men came off the wall at once.
"Gentlemen," Rafe said quietly.
He had not raised his voice.
The men stopped.
His hand moved on my back, one slow stroke up my spine, and I understood it as a question.
I could have turned into him.
I could have let him carry the room, as he plainly would have.
I did not want anyone carrying it for me.
I took a breath and stepped out from under his hand.
My heels clicked on the wood floor as I walked.
The whole hall watched me cross it, my skirt dragging, the veil I had not taken off still pinned in my hair.
Julien kept smiling, and he opened his free arm a little, waiting for me to walk into it.
I stopped an arm's length away.
He smelled of salt and cheap cologne.
His forearms were burnt dark to the elbow.
I reached up to my throat and pulled the thin chain out of the neckline of my dress.
My first wedding band hung from it, gold, a little worn.
I had worn it against my skin for eight months.
I broke the clasp with my thumbnail.
The ring slid into my palm, warm from my body.
"Camille," Julien said softly. "Baby, let me explain."
I took the champagne glass out of his hand.
I dropped the ring into it, and it sank through the gold bubbles to the bottom.
Then I handed him back the glass.
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