Chapter 11: The Napkin

The napkin was soft as cloth from handling, and the ink had gone fuzzy at the edges.

The handwriting was small, loopy and slanted hard to the right.

It was mine.

TERMS, it said across the top, underlined twice.

1. No sex unless I ask.

2. Sober.

3. On a day nobody told me to.

4. In my own words.

5. If I never ask, we never do.

Under it, in the bottom corner, in a tall tidy hand I knew from three years of birthday cards: Agreed. T. Renner.

There was a faint ring across the middle where a champagne glass had sat.

I read it twice. Then I sat down on the roof, in the gravel, in my good skirt.

"I don't remember this," I said.

"I know."

"I wrote this?"

"At the hotel bar, in the first hour of our wedding night. You asked the bartender for a pen."

I put a hand over my mouth.

The memory came back slowly, in pieces, like a dream I had been trying to catch for years.

My father's company had failed that spring.

The families had arranged the wedding in six weeks, over two dinners, and everyone told me how lucky I was.

My aunt had pulled me aside before the ceremony and said, "Just get through the first night, darling. Do your duty."

I had drunk three glasses of champagne at the reception, and I had not eaten, and I was terrified.

I remembered the bar and the bartender, and a stranger in a black tuxedo sitting very still on the next stool.

I remembered saying I would not be bought.

"You said it very clearly," Tobias said.

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