Page 140 of Graceless

Silence. The specific silence of a very old machine changing gears.

"We are already married."

I turned around. He was entirely serious — level, certain, faintly puzzled.

"I'm sorry — we're what?"

"Married." He came into the room, counting it off like inventory. "You took me into your home. I gave you my word, the binding kind. We made vows across that table with witnesses on the wall. I have known you as a husband knows a wife, and there is a child." A small frown, as if checking the math a final time. "By every law that existed when the laws were written, Caterina, you have been my wife since the house rules went on the refrigerator."

I stared at him. He stared at me, genuinely confused about my confusion.

"The refrigerator—" I put my hand over my eyes. Started laughing. Couldn't stop. "No. No, you enormous — I mean married married. In a church. With a priest and a dress and Nina crying and Joey in a suit he hates."

His face did something I have never seen it do. Not the wall. Not the stillness. A kind of slow dawning horror, arriving in geological time.

"A church."

"A church."

"Inside the church."

"That's traditionally where they keep the altar, yes."

He looked at the saints. The saints looked back, all eleven, with what I would describe as institutional satisfaction.

"Caterina. I have not been inside one of those in—" he stopped, recalculated, gave up. "The last time I stood in a consecrated building, it had just been built. By hand. I watched them raise the roof beam."

"Then you're overdue."

"The dress," he said, with the air of a man seeking any exit. "You have expressed opinions about dresses at present."

"Obviously after. After the baby, after I can fit in something with a waist, after I have collarbones again. Next year. Spring." I came across the room and stood in front of him and took both his hands, and the laughing settled into the other thing, the thing under it. "My Nonna got married at Regina Pacis in 1962. My whole family, Raq. The block. The baby. I want the paper, the priest, the bad photographer. I want to marry you where everybody can see."

And there it was — the thing that undoes him every time, being seen, being claimed in the open — moving through his face before he could bank it.

"Yes," he said. Immediately. Completely. Because he would agree to anything I asked with my hands in his hands, and we both know it, and I try to use it responsibly.

Then, after a moment, hopefully:

"Does it have to be inside the⁠—"

"Yes."

He groaned. Older than the calendar, survivor of the fall, winner of a fistfight with an angel, and he groaned like Joey at a parking ticket.

"Fine," he said. "A church. A dress. The suit Joey hates." His hands tightened on mine, and the surrender turned into the vow it had been all along. "Anywhere you stand, I will stand. Even there."

"Even there," I agreed, and kissed him, and Saint Anne watched, and I swear to God she smirked.

He took me to bed slow that night, the June air through the screen and his hands relearning the new geography of me — careful of the curve, unhurried, murmuring into my skin in a language older than the saints — and after, I lay against the furnace of him with my ring finger bare and my whole life full, and fell asleep knowing that somewhere under his stillness, two heartbeats were being listened to.

I woke at six to light and birdsong and an empty bed, which meant coffee.

I found him in the studio.

He was standing at the back window — the old one, the painted-shut one, the one that hasn't opened since Eisenhower — and he was not moving, and the coffee was nowhere, and every hair on my arms stood up before I even saw what he was looking at.

On the inside sill, white against the old paint, lay a feather.