The Bride Ran, So I Wore Her Crown and Married the Valley's Don novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: The Night Before
The night before the fire, Seta took my father's truck to Bakersfield to fetch the man she had left in a motel.
My father told her to bring him back alive and to check the tire.
By ten the farmhouse was dark.
Shushan had gone to bed with her rosary, and my father's lamp was out in the cottage.
I found my husband on the porch daybed under the bare pomegranate trees.
He sat in his coat, with the quilt from my mother's bed across his knees.
He had taken the glove off himself.
It lay on the boards beside his boot, empty and curled, and he was looking at his hand.
"You'll freeze," I said.
"I wanted to see it in the dark."
I sat down next to him and pulled half of the quilt over me.
The air smelled of woodsmoke and frost, and the whole orchard ticked in the cold.
"Tomorrow you say it," I said.
"Yes."
"All of it."
"Yes." He turned the hand over. "Talin. If the Valley turns, you should know what you hold."
"Tell me."
"The license in the county book says Vahan Kasparian. The priest said Vahan at the altar. There is no paper in which you are Armen's wife." He said it evenly, as he said everything that cost him. "Garo's clause only holds if the marriage lasts. When it breaks, he takes your father's house back, and I cannot give it to you in my own name."
"Say the rest."
"You can walk. Tonight, in the morning, after the fire. I have put money aside in your name, in a bank in Fresno, and the lawyer has the papers. Nobody could say you did wrong."
"No," I said.
"Talin."
"I didn't marry a paper," I said. "I married a man who pulled my father's oxygen machine apart on the first night and fixed it, and rewound my mother's motor. You can call yourself anything you like at the courthouse."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of The Bride Ran, So I Wore Her Crown and Married the Valley's Don are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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