My Father Married Me to the Man I Watched Shoot Someone, and the Only Witness Is His Wife novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Yes
At the iconostasis of St. Sava's Nadia recognizes the groom as the man she watched shoot someone at the ore dock, says yes, puts the ring on him herself and whispers what she saw; he says they had better dance.
The groom turned his head to take the ring from his cousin, and I knew his face.
I was standing at the gold screen of St. Sava's in a borrowed white dress, in front of two hundred people, and my knees went.
I locked them.
I had never met him.
My father had told me about him eleven days ago, over coffee, in the voice he used for good news.
"The Petrovic dock owes the Kralj family four million dollars, Nadia.
"You will be the payment.
"It's a good name.
"He's a serious man."
I had said, "I'm not a payment."
My father had put his hand over mine and said, "Of course not, moya draga.
"You're a bride."
Now the priest stood between us with the book open and the candles burning behind him, and the groom looked down at me from his height.
He had black hair going gray at the temples and dark eyes with nothing in them.
He looked at me the way a man looks at a horse he has been sold, polite and unimpressed.
He did not know me.
I knew him.
Nineteen nights ago I had worked late in the courthouse annex.
I had walked across the ore dock lot to my car at twenty past eleven.
Under the sodium lamp at the edge of the number-three slip, a man in a long dark coat had put two shots into another man and pushed him off the edge.
The body had gone into the black water without a sound.
The shooter had turned toward the lamp for a brief moment.
It was this face.
The next morning my father had stirred his coffee and said, to nobody, that the harbor keeps its own law.
He said a stenographer who writes down what she is not asked to write down gets her name in the wrong book.
I had not told him what I saw.
I had not told anyone.
I have spent six years in a county courtroom writing down every word other people say, and not one of my own.
The priest looked at the groom.
"Xavier, wilt thou have this woman?"
"I will," the groom said.
His voice was low and level.
He did not look at the water in the paintings of the saints, or at me.
He wore a plain steel watch on his right wrist, under a white cuff, and a hole in his left hand where the ring should be.
His cousin, a man with a shaved head and a toothpick he had been told to take out, put the ring in his palm.
The priest turned to me.
"Nadia, wilt thou have this man?"
I could see my father in the front pew, beaming, his gold cross shining on his chest.
I could see the whole parish waiting.
I could say it.
I could turn to the church and say that the man at my side was a murderer, and that my father knew the harbor's law, and that I had watched.
I opened my mouth.
I thought about the number-three slip.
I thought about how quietly the water had closed.
"Yes," I said.
The priest smiled and held out the ring for me.
I took it from his fingers, not from the groom's, and I took the groom's left hand myself.
It was big and warm and dry, and the knuckles were scarred.
I felt his hand go still in mine.
I slid the ring on, all the way to the base.
The priest joined our hands under the stole.
The choir began, and the organ came up under it, and nobody in that church could hear a thing but music.
I leaned in as if I were going to kiss his cheek.
"Number three slip," I said into his ear, in my courtroom voice, the one that has read back testimony in eleven murder trials without shaking.
"A long coat.
"Two shots.
"I wrote down the time."
His thumb was on my wrist.
It pressed down on my pulse and stayed.
"You have exactly as long as the reception," I said, "to decide whether I am your wife or your witness."
His grip tightened until the bones of my hand ground together.
I did not make a sound.
When I pulled back he was smiling for the guests, a perfect, bland, married smile.
He lifted our joined hands to the congregation.
The church rose.
He bent his head, and his mouth was a breath from my ear.
"Then we had better dance, Mrs. Kralj," he said.
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