Wash Her Feet novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Fourth Appointment
At the courthouse door Lance and Shelby freeze again; Hallie moves on purpose, hands back the ring, and a stranger says Shelby is his sister.
The fourth time Lance drove me to the courthouse to marry him, he and my best friend stopped dead on the top step.
Shelby had my left arm and Lance had my right.
I pulled them toward the glass doors with all my weight, and neither of them moved an inch.
I knew exactly what this was.
It was the freeze game again.
Somebody says "freeze," nobody says when it ends, and the first person to move or speak loses.
The loser washes the winner's feet.
I had lost every round for a year, and I had washed Shelby's feet four times in a plastic basin.
Once it was in front of twelve people at her birthday brunch.
Last spring we went to a bungee platform over a quarry and agreed to jump together on three.
They shoved me off on two.
I am terrified of heights.
When I climbed back up the ladder with my legs shaking, they were both still standing at the edge, rigid and silent.
Lance finally said, "We were playing freeze. You lost."
When he proposed, I held out my left hand across the restaurant table.
Lance lifted the ring over my fingers and went still.
Shelby whispered "freeze," and the whole table waited with him.
I held my hand in the air until the candle between us burned out.
Then he slid the ring onto Shelby's finger "for safekeeping" and said, "You moved first, Hal."
She gave it back to me over dessert, and I put it on myself.
I said yes to him anyway.
My father had died two years before, and Shelby had held my hand through his whole funeral.
She was the only family I had, and Lance had become hers too.
The first three times they took me to the courthouse, they froze at the door until the clerk's window closed.
Each time Shelby squeezed my shoulder and said, "I'll rebook it. You two just breathe."
She booked every date herself, and I called that love.
Now a wedding party at the bottom of the steps had gone quiet and turned toward us.
A woman in a rented tux held up her phone.
Two women with strollers stopped to film.
Lance's sandy hair was perfect, and his big salesman smile was fixed on the doors.
His eyes slid sideways to Shelby, waiting for her to nod.
Shelby wore her good black dress, and her face was calm and kind.
"It's tradition," she had said that morning, tucking my veil in place. "You'll laugh about it at the reception."
The reception was supposed to be tonight, in the backyard of my father's house.
Shelby had planned all of it, down to the lanterns.
In sixteen years she had never once come past the gate of that house.
She said old houses gave her the creeps.
She always waited at the gate until I came out to get her, and tonight she had promised to wait there again.
I looked at the two of them, calm and pleased with themselves, and I felt something in me go quiet.
I was not scared anymore, I was done.
So I did the one thing I had never done.
I moved on purpose, and I spoke on purpose.
"I lose," I said. "I lose every time. I'm finished."
Lance thawed at once, grinning, and swung his phone up to film me.
"That's a forfeit, Hal. Tonight, at our party. You wash her feet in front of everybody."
"Don't be dramatic," Shelby said, laughing warmly. "It's just the rule."
I worked the ring off my finger, and it came loose easily after a year of wearing it.
I set it in Lance's open palm.
"I'm not washing anything," I said. "Not tonight, not ever."
His smile finally slipped.
"You can't just walk away from the courthouse, Hallie. We've got an appointment."
"You've got an appointment," I said. "Take Shelby."
The woman in the tux let out a short, shocked laugh, and her phone stayed up.
Shelby stepped between us and put a gentle hand on my arm.
"She's upset," she told Lance, soft enough to sound caring and loud enough for the strollers to hear. "Let her walk it off. She'll text me by dinner."
I looked at her hand on my sleeve.
It was warm and steady, and for sixteen years it had always been the hand I reached for.
I took it off my arm.
Then I walked down the steps, past the wedding party and the strollers, with my veil still pinned to my head.
My knees shook the whole way, but I did not turn around.
At the bottom, a man stood up off the last step.
He had been sitting there the entire time, a hard hat beside him and a half-eaten sandwich on his knee, watching us without a word.
He was big, in work boots and a canvas jacket, with a nose that had been broken once.
"Hallie Bradstreet," he said.
I stopped. I had never seen him before in my life, and he knew my name.
"I'm Rafe Kessel," he said, and he looked past me to the top of the steps. "Shelby is my sister."
"Shelby doesn't have a brother," I said. "She doesn't have anyone. Her whole family is dead."
"That's what she told you," Rafe said, and his eyes were not kind.
He picked up his hard hat.
"I haven't seen her since she was sixteen," he said. "Ask her why she's been lying to you for sixteen years."
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