The Home She Built With Someone Else novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Courthouse Steps

Margot's POV

The courthouse had the same steps, the same brass rail and the same guard at the metal detector.

I had not been back since the day I married Nigel.

It was a Tuesday then too, and it rained.

Nigel had said a big wedding would only bring my father's lawyers, and I had been tired and in love, and I said yes to the clerk's office and a borrowed pen.

I had worn a gray dress and bought myself a bouquet from the corner stand.

I had told myself it was romantic that nobody knew.

Now I walked up the same steps in the same gray, because it was the only thing in my closet that fit the mood.

The decree was a single page.

A clerk at a window slid it under the glass with a yellow flag on the line where I signed.

"Last page," she said, kindly. "The judge signed this morning. Yours is the only line left."

I looked at the flag.

I thought of Justine, and what she had said about little yellow flags.

I almost laughed.

I signed my name, Margot Tornquist, the whole of it, and I did not add the second name I had once practiced on a napkin.

"That's it?" I asked.

"That's it, dear."

"I thought it would take longer."

"They always do," the clerk said. "It's the part before that takes longer."

She stamped it.

The stamp was louder than the vows had been.

I stood at the window a little longer than I needed to, holding my copy.

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