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“There’s some good news and some bad news. You can get the marriage annulled, assuming your husband is in agreement with regards to the circumstances. The bad news is, that because we’re not in the state where the marriage took place, you’ll need to have been resident here for thirty days before you can apply for that. It could have been done in Nevada, though.”
I sigh deeply. I wanted to get it all fixed before I left Vegas, but Luke being so stubborn meant that it hadn’t happened. He insisted on meeting for some reason, and I had not been up to that.
And besides, I had to leave quickly to start my new job. I figured Claire could help me out with anything that needed to be done in Nevada.
I don’t know what it is about me and marriage, but bad luck seems to follow me around when it comes to matters of the heart. I should just swear off men forever; that would make my life so much simpler.
I’ve been married before, to a beautiful man named Gio. It was around three years ago.
We met at a cocktail bar in town, and he’d caught my eye from across the room as soon as I saw him. He was funny, charming, self-confident and assertive. Oh, and gorgeous as all hell.
It had been a whirlwind romance, and I’d fallen for him harder and faster than anyone I’d ever met. We were married within months, and it was only then that the cracks started to show.
Gio told me that he worked for the ‘family business’, but was always reluctant to let me actually visit. Naively, I always assumed it was a restaurant or something like that, but then one day he showed up beaten black and blue. He tried to pass it off as a random act of violence from a stranger, but I didn’t buy it.
I’d done some research, and discovered that Gio’s family was one of the oldest and most notorious mob families in San Francisco.
I cursed myself for my stupidity, and confronted him about it. He came clean but told me not to worry, that he would always shield me from that side of his life, that he didn’t want me to have anything to do with it, and that’s why he’d hidden it from me in the first place.
I believed him, which was probably the most stupid thing of all. Within weeks he was dead—killed in a gunfight in some alley behind a club. He died instantly from a bullet to the head.
I was absolutely devastated.
Luckily, we never brought any children into our fucked-up life, although there had been a miscarriage early on in our marriage.
It felt like the end of the world at the time, but it had been the one thing that allowed me to make a clean break from Gio’s family and all the baggage that that entailed. Had we had a child together, I would never have been able to escape. As it was, I’d cut ties, moved away, and tried to move on.
It wasn’t easy, though. I’d loved Gio fiercely, loved him in the way someone might love a bird with a broken wing laying on the sidewalk. I’d wanted to protect him, to remove him from the dangerous life that he led, but in the end, it had been impossible.
So I ran, regrouped, and tried to get my life back on track. Landing this new job had been the culmination of all that effort. The final step, the final piece of the puzzle.
And, of course, I’ve now fucked it all up. Over a man. Again.
Tears are running down my face now, and the kindly lawyer offers me a tissue. I take it gratefully and try to clean myself up a little.
“I know how you feel, sweetheart, but this kind of thing happens all the time. You wouldn’t believe some of the crazy stories I hear. We can get this done in no time at all, once this waiting period is up. It’ll be like it never happened, and you’ll never even have to tell anyone. It’ll be a clean slate, and you can move on with your life, just leave it all to me.”
I thank him and gather my things to leave, promising to return once the waiting period is up and I actually have some money to pay him.
I take the bus home, things weighing heavily on my mind. As an afterthought, I get off a stop early and go into a pharmacy.
My period still hasn’t started, and it’s normally so regular. I tell myself that I can’t be pregnant, not after one night. I can’t be that unlucky, surely?
It’s probably just the stress of recent events throwing my body out of whack. I spend five of my last ten dollars on a pregnancy test.
