“You’re awfully quiet, yeah?” He pulls back to study my face. “Look, I know what we did is kind of crazy, but I don’t regret it. Do you?”
I shake my head, suddenly shy. “Of course not. But shouldn’t we maybe talk? About what it all means.”
“It means what we want it to mean. We figure it out as we go.” His eyes are such a clear blue, so translucent, there is nothing to hide behind as he gazes down at me with an expression that strips me bare. He puts his mouth to my ear and whispers lines of his poetry, with that Irish burr that vibrates something deep in my bones: “We shall always be alone, we shall always be you and I alone on earth, to start our life.”
And I think to myself: Does it matter, really, who asked who? The outcome is the same: That I won’t ever be alone again. I am thirty-two years old and I have a husband. I am about to build a whole new family again; and it didn’t happen at all in the way I imagined, but here I am, regardless. Loved, for better or worse. Something wild flutters inside me, like doves set suddenly free, until I think I might burst.
And I think of my friends back in New York City and wonder what they’ll say when they discover that I married a scholar and a writer, a poet, and from an old aristocratic Irish family to boot. A man I’ve known only eighteen—no, nineteen!—days. How surprised they’ll be! (Oh, Saskia: Take that for an unexpected narrative line.) Most of all, I think of Victor, with a pleasant throb of vindictiveness. You thought I was shallow and predictable; well, look at me now.
Outside, the snow is falling again, veiling the pines that I can see through the bedroom windows. Stonehaven is cold and silent, except for us in our velvet-lined room on the second floor. Just a few weeks ago, this place was a tomb. Now, with Michael in bed beside me, it feels like the beginning of a new life. I think that maybe I can be happy here, after all. I’m happy already!
Michael’s arms slide around me and he pulls me into his furred chest and I settle there, waiting until the throbbing in my brain matches the slow, calm beat of his heart. His lips on my forehead, his hands in my hair, as if all of me now belongs to him. Which—I do, I do, I do.
“I love you,” I say, and I mean it.
* * *
—
I wake up a wife, and I practically overflow with joy.
* * *
—
There’s something foreign and heavy weighing down my left ring finger. When I lift my hand to look, I see an antique engagement ring, diamond baguettes surrounding a plush emerald. Five carats, maybe; a Deco design; overly ornate in the way of antiques. The ring droops on my finger and I use the tip of my pinkie to push it back and forth so that the stones catch the light. It’s pretty, even if it’s fussier than something I would have picked out myself. Another memory that rises up from the murk of the previous evening: The two of us stumbling into my father’s study with a bottle of Don Julio in hand, Michael weaving slightly behind me as I open the safe and pull out a ring that I’d stashed there in the dark. Michael kneeling in front of me and slipping it on my finger. Or maybe he didn’t kneel at all; maybe he just slipped it on while gazing deeply into my eyes.
Or maybe I put it on myself, without even asking his permission. It’s possible.
Michael closes his hand over mine. “When I have a chance, I’ll get you a new ring, one without any baggage. We’ll go down to San Francisco and find a jeweler and get one made. As big as you like. Ten carats, twenty.”
And I remember first seeing this ring in her hand, the way she clutched at it as if it were a rope that was going to tow her up and out