The Stranger I Married novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Client
Maya walks into the Hartwell Chicago boardroom to pitch lobby flowers and finds the COO is the stranger she married in Reno; he lays the Nevada record on the table: the annulment was never filed.
The man at the head of the boardroom table had a beard now, and no hair at all.
I still knew him by the hands.
They were folded on a leather folder, big and careful.
I knew the thumb that had pushed a silver ring onto my finger five years ago.
I was standing in the doorway of the Hartwell Chicago boardroom with a portfolio under my arm and wet October rain in my shoes.
My pitch was in the portfolio.
Forty installations for the lobby, the bar and the ballroom, and a quote that would keep my studio open all winter.
"Ms. Ferris," said the woman beside him, a young assistant with a tablet. "Mr. Hartwell is our chief operating officer."
"Elias," he said.
He did not smile.
He stood up, and he was taller than I remembered, and his round glasses caught the window light.
"Come in, please. We've been looking forward to your work."
I walked to the table because my legs did it for me.
Six people in suits watched me sit down.
I set the portfolio on the table and opened my mouth to say something about peonies.
Instead I said, "You told me your name was Eli."
The assistant stopped typing.
Nobody else moved.
"I did," he said. "In Reno."
I heard the word Reno land on the table.
"Maya," I said, because it felt important to say it first. "In case you've forgotten that too."
"I haven't forgotten anything."
His voice was low and level, and it did something to the back of my neck that I did not approve of.
Five years ago I was twenty-four and on my best friend's bachelorette weekend.
She had dared me to marry the next man who bought me a drink.
He bought me a whiskey, and I laughed.
By midnight I was a bride in a chapel on Virginia Street with a plastic bouquet.
The next morning we signed papers to undo it.
I had not thought about that man in a hotel boardroom, in a navy suit, with six people watching me.
"I'd like to speak to you alone," I said.
"Anything you want to say, you can say here."
That was when I understood he was giving me a choice.
I could pretend we were strangers and win a hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars.
I could say it now, in front of his whole team, and lose it.
My studio had fourteen thousand dollars in the bank and a landlord with a lawyer.
I thought about my employees, six of them, and Carly's toddler, and my mother's bills.
Then I thought about the man I was engaged to, who had a diamond on my hand and a campaign on his calendar.
I took my left hand off the table and put it in my lap.
"Fine," I said. "Here, then."
I looked at the six faces.
"Mr. Hartwell and I were married for one night in Reno five years ago, on a dare, and we annulled it the next morning."
A pen hit the floor.
"I'm not going to pretend I don't know him, and I'm not going to take your money while you do."
The assistant had gone pale.
"Draw up whatever you need to confirm that," I said to him, "and I'll sign it today.
I'll walk out, and you can hire somebody else for your peonies."
I stood.
Nobody breathed.
Elias put one finger on the leather folder and slid it down the table toward me.
It stopped at my hand.
"Open it," he said.
I opened it.
It was a page printed from a county website, in small gray type.
There was my full name, and under it his.
Marriage record, Washoe County, Nevada.
The date was the Friday I remembered.
Next to it was a box, and the box said STATUS.
It said ACTIVE.
"That isn't right," I said. "We signed the annulment. I have the papers."
"Signed isn't filed," Elias said.
"The clerk said I'd..."
I stopped, because I could hear myself.
The clerk had said to file them with the county within thirty days.
I had put the envelope in my bag and gotten a phone call and flown straight home to a hospital in Illinois.
And then I had hired a lawyer, the next spring, and I had been told it was done.
"There's a decree," I said. "I got a letter."
"I know," Elias said.
"How do you know?"
He did not answer that.
He took off his glasses and looked at me with brown eyes I had last seen in the gray light of a hotel room.
The assistant picked her pen off the floor and did not look up.
"No annulment was ever filed, anywhere in Nevada," he said quietly.
"Maya, you're still my wife."
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