They Sold Me. The Devil Married Me Chapter 14

They Sold Me. The Devil Married Me Chapter 14

It was the St. Jude medal.

My grandmother’s. Nine years in a glass case on the third floor, and here it was, taped to a sheet of card in his handwriting, worn smooth in one spot from a thumb that had clearly touched it a thousand times.

Underneath it, four lines:

The petition is your door. This is my vote.

Patron saint of lost causes. He’s been extremely busy.

Nine years ago you told a dying man to stay till morning. It’s morning, Elena. It’s been morning for a while

now.

Marry me again. Slowly this time. – N.

I looked up.

Nikolai Varga

– a man who had walked into a room of a hundred and fifty armed men without altering

his pulse – was standing in our bedroom doorway looking exactly like a twenty-five-year-old bleeding on a floor, waiting to find out if anyone in the world was going to stay.

I walked over to the suitcase.

I watched him stop breathing.

And I picked it up and turned it upside down and dumped every folded thing onto the carpet.

“I’m keeping the door,” I said, my voice wrecked and absolutely certain. “Framed. On the wall. Where I can see it every morning, so we both remember that I could leave-”

I crossed the room and took his face in both hands.

“-and every morning, I stay. Yes, Nikolai. Slowly. Yes.”

The sound he made when his arms came around me wasn’t a word in any language I know. We stood

in the dark in the middle of my unpacked life, his face in my hair, his heart slamming against mine – and somewhere between one breath and the next, our daughter kicked. Hard. Right between us.

He pulled back an inch. Looked down. Looked up.

“Outvoted,” he said hoarsely. “Two to nothing.”

We married again in June.

Not in a ballroom. In the courtyard of the free clinic he built on Calloway Street, on the corner where Bianchi’s grocery used to stand – the clinic that has my grandmother’s name over the door and treats anyone who walks in, no questions, no names, no families.

Forty guests instead of three hundred, and every single one of them chosen. Renata was my maid of honor and cried harder than I did, which was a genuine athletic achievement. I wore white because it was mine to wear.

And I walked myself down that aisle. Not because no one offered. Because I wanted the whole world to watch a woman arrive at her own life under her own power.

Matteo was sentenced that autumn. The fraud, the tape, the intersection at Concord. Nineteen years. Camilla took a plea and lives somewhere small and warm and irrelevant, which for my sister is the crueler sentence by far. My father watched his empire absorbed into his son-in-law’s from a cell block common room, and died of the knowledge slowly, the way he’d have wanted.

My brother Nico writes to me. Short letters. He signs them I’m sorry. I’ve written back twice.

My mother writes too. I read them all. I haven’t answered yet.

Yet is a word I’ve made peace with.

Our daughter was born on a Tuesday in September at 11:47 p.m. – the exact minute, as Nikolai pointed out with unbearable smugness, that I signed the first marriage. She has my recklessness already and his unnerving stare, and the first time the nurse laid her on my chest, the Wolf of the Harbor cried so hard the obstetrician had to find him a chair.

We named her Jude.

Some nights I still wake at 3 a.m. with orchids and speakers in my dreams, and the warm press of a gun at my temple. The girl in that ballroom thought her life ended under those flowers. I wish I could reach back through nine months and kneel on that marble beside her and tell her what I know now:

They didn’t take your wedding, sweetheart. They took the wrong one. They cleared the aisle.

At Jude’s christening last month, the old priest who buried my grandmother, who has known this city’s sins for fifty years asked my husband how the two of us began.

Nikolai stood there in a black suit with our sleeping daughter over his shoulder and thought about it for a long moment. Nine years. An empire. A manhunt. A midnight judge. An intersection full of glass.

Then he looked across the room at me and gave the only answer either of us has ever needed.

“She let me bleed on her floor,” said my husband.

“And she stayed till morning-”

“-and then morning came,” I finished, “and we stayed for that top,”

We still do.

Every single day, we still do.

THE END