Chapter 23: The Drawer

The judge signed my final decree at ten on a Wednesday morning, three weeks to the day.

It took four minutes.

I walked out of the courthouse a single woman with a folder under my arm.

Hamish was waiting at the bottom of the steps with his hands in his jacket pockets.

He said nothing.

He only held out his arm, and I took it.

That night my friend from the office kept both children at her house.

She said it was a sleepover for Ivy.

She said it with a wink so large I laughed all the way up the stairs of the river house.

The baby slept at her house in a borrowed crib with a new blanket.

I had counted his fingers twice before I left.

The house was quiet.

Hamish took my coat and hung it on the hook by the door.

Then he took my hand and led me up to his room, and stopped in front of the tall dresser.

"Open the top drawer," he said.

"Hamish."

"Open it."

I pulled it out.

It was empty.

It was clean and bare and smelled of cedar.

In the back corner sat the small gray box, worn at the corners.

"I cleared it Tuesday," he said. "It's yours. For whatever you want to put in it."

My throat closed.

"I said I'd ask you in a church."

"You did."

"I can't wait for a church." He took the box out and turned to me.

"I want to ask you in a room where no one is watching, where you can say no."

He went down on one knee on the floorboards.

It was not a grand motion.

He did it carefully, as if his knee hurt, and looked up at me, plain and worn and honest.

"Marina Holloway," he said. "I wanted a swab from a baby, and I got a woman who tore up a contract in front of two hundred people."

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