The word comes out of my mouth and then it exists in the world and there is nothing I can do about that now.
"Yes."
The judge nods. Daniel's barrister says something sharp from the other table — I catch manufactured and bad faith and this court cannot possibly — and the judge says, with the particular patience of a man who has heard every version of this, that motive is not within the court's jurisdiction. He closes the session. People begin moving.
Cassie is already packing her folder. Daniel is saying something to his lawyer in a voice I cannot hear and do not need to. Vivian, two rows behind him, has her hand flat on the seat back in front of her, which I have learned to read as the specific stillness of a woman recalibrating.
I look at none of them directly. I look at the table in front of me and I think: I just agreed to marry a man I have not spoken to in six years, in front of a judge, in order to get my daughter back.
This is fine. Everything is fine. I am a completely reasonable person making completely reasonable decisions.
Christian appears at my elbow. "Ready?"
"Define ready," I say.
He picks up my bag from the chair and hands it to me, which is presumptuous, and I take it, which is its own kind of answer.
On the pavement outside the building the afternoon is cold and very ordinary — people passing, a bus, pigeons doing whatever it is pigeons do when history is not being made near them. We stand on the pavement and neither of us says anything for a moment.
"Are you hungry?" he asks.
I think about it. "I don't know."
"Okay," he says. "Come on."
He drives us somewhere I don't recognize — a small place, a corner table, no one who knows either of us. I order whatever he orders because the words are too small to matter and wrap both hands around the coffee when it arrives.
At some point I say: "I don't know where to go tonight. Physically. I'm trying to think through whether I go back to the house or —" I stop. "I haven't worked this part out."
He looks at me across the table. "What do you mean you don't know?"
"I mean I don't have a…"
"My house is yours now." He says it the way he says most things — plainly, with no apparent awareness that it should be a more complicated sentence than it is. "That's not a new offer. That's just what's true."
He is looking out the window at the street and he means it completely, with the calm of a man who has already done all of his thinking about this and is simply waiting for me to catch up.
I open my mouth to say something reasonable and his phone buzzes. "Cassie," he says, and answers it and sets it on the table between us on speaker.
"Christian." Cassie's voice, brisk and already moving. "The court conditions attach to the marriage date, not the engagement. An engagement on record is legally meaningless without the certificate. If Daniel files a motion today — and he will, probably within the hour — he can contest the arrangement before it's legally complete and buy himself several weeks."
The table is very quiet and I look at Christian and he looks back at me over the phone between us on the table.
"The marriage needs to happen today," she says. "Before close of business."
Cassie hangs up. I set my coffee down and look at Christian across the table.
"So we need to get married today," I say.
"We do." He says it with the specific calm of a man confirming a lunch reservation.
"And you're — fine with that."
"I'm your husband in about forty minutes, so I'd better be."
Something in the corner of his mouth moves. I decide not to acknowledge it.
"Christian." I keep my voice level. "I need you to know something. I am genuinely, completely grateful for what you're doing. I mean that. But this is — " I stop. "It's a legal arrangement. That's what it is. I need us to be clear on that going in, because I don't want you to —"
"Emily."
"I'm serious. I don't want there to be any —"
"I know what this is," he says. Not sharp. Not hurt. Just even, the way he says everything, looking at me across the table with that expression I cannot fully read. "You don't need to manage my expectations."
"I'm not managing your—"
"How far is the nearest registrar?" he asks.
"Twelve minutes," I say, because I looked it up while Cassie was still talking.
I look at the clock on the wall — four-nineteen — and then back at him, and he is watching me with that steady quality he has, the one that has been there since the fire escape and the car park and the hospital corridor, the one that does not ask anything and does not rush anything and does not flinch.
"The rules conversation," he says. "I'll have it with you on the way."
"You don't have an opinion on whether this is—"
"Emily." Quiet. "We have thirty-nine minutes."
Cassie hangs up somewhere in the middle of that and I sit with the fact that I just said it's not real to a man who has been in love with me for twenty years and watched his face not move.
I think: that was either the cruelest thing I have said in this entire catastrophe or he is better at this than I have given him credit for, and I cannot tell which bothers me more.
"Then we should go," I say.
He is already standing, leaving enough on the table to cover the bill and a tip for the waiter who brought us things we didn't eat, and I follow him out.
The city is doing its afternoon things around us — cold and bright and indifferent to the fact that I am about to do something I cannot undo.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I see the name through the fabric without checking it — Daniel — because of course he already knows, he was in that room, he heard every word, and whatever calculation he has been running since we left the building has produced an answer he does not like. I put the phone in my bag.
Christian pulls out into traffic, checks the mirror, and I turn to him.
"You said on the way," I say. "The rules."
"I did."
"So."
He glances at the clock on the dash. "You want rules."
"I want us to be clear."
"We're clear," he says.
"That's not—"
"Emily." He doesn't look at me. He is watching the road with the same quality of total attention he brings to everything — the same quality, I notice for the first time, that he has always brought specifically to me.
"I have known you for thirty years. I understand what this is and what it isn't. You don't need to protect me from the arrangement." A pause. "What you might want to think about, while we still have thirty-six minutes, is whether the arrangement is the part that bothers you."
I look out the window at the city going past and I do not answer that, which is itself an answer, and we both know it.
The registrar's office is a grey building on a grey street and it looks exactly like what it is — a place where things are made legally binding without ceremony.
There is a parking space directly outside, which seems like either good luck or the universe deciding it has done enough damage for one day and is offering a small concession.
Christian turns off the engine and looks at me.
"Ready?" he asks.
I think about what I said in the restaurant. This is obviously not real. I think about him standing up in the courtroom. I think about the rules conversation I just failed to have and the question I just failed to answer.
"No," I say. "Let's go anyway."