It was a Wednesday, and two witnesses for Ares's legal team who had clearly seen a lot, at least for Ares's legal team, and by which I mean they looked like people whose jobs it was to learn not to comment about any of this stuff.
A clerk named Patricia, who had spent twenty-three years at the business of marrying people here and, after about a second or third of those years, gave up pretending that the ceremony was anything more than the paperwork.
Alora was wearing the best dress she owned, a blue cotton number that came to her knees and had been purchased for clearance two summers ago, which she had ironed that morning with a travel-size iron loaned from the neighbor. She'd done her own hair. She was wearing one pair of heels that didn't make her want to cry after 20 minutes. Ares was in a charcoal suit that fit as though it had been tailored to his build — which it had. She knew this because she had overheard his assistant confirm the tailor's delivery that morning, in the penthouse hallway, behind a door not closed all the way.
His suit was likely eight thousand dollars. Originally, she'd paid forty-seven for hers, and gotten it for eleven.
He did not comment on it.
She had not expected him to. What she hadn't counted on was the split second, so small it could have been invented — when she'd walked into the waiting room and his eyes traveled from her face down the length of her and back, and something in his eyes shifted, half a second rearrangement he controlled before it settled into anything she could name.
"Ready?" he said.
"Ready," she said.
Patricia glided through the ceremony with the efficiency of a person who had somewhere to go afterward. Patricia also blurted I do before finishing the sentence, which inspired a moment of officiatory offense. Ares said his like a man renewing his lease.
"You may now kiss—"
"Thank you, Patricia," Ares said, already turning half away.
Patricia stared at him.
"It's required by law," she responded, with the flat authority of a woman who had heard every excuse.
Ares turned back.
Alora tilted her chin upward and he inclined his gaze toward hers with the bearing of someone filing paperwork.
He bent.
His lips met hers.
Two seconds.
And then it was done, and he was shrugging into his jacket, and Alora was in a fluorescent municipal office in a dress that she'd bought for eleven dollars, married to a man worth nine hundred fifty billion dollars, the ghost of the most businesslike kiss in human history still on her lips.
She thought: twelve months.
She thought: fine.
She didn't think about the fact that it had felt, for precisely one of those two seconds, like something she'd needed to literally resist leaning into.
That never crossed her mind at all.
The penthouse lay forty-two floors up, its walls made of windows and the city patchwork-thin beneath it like a circuit board someone had lit on fire.
She stood in the entry hall, with all of her belongings — one large suitcase and a tote bag full of odds and ends — stacked in such a way that it was obvious they could fit in this foyer and there would still be space left over.
Ares glided around the space like someone never forced to wonder whether they belonged anywhere.
"Second door on your left is your room." Mrs. Cho comes on Monday and Thursday — she has standing instructions not to go into your space without permission. The fridge is stocked. You got the south bathroom, I've got the north, they don't cross over.' He glanced back at her. "Any questions?"
"Is there a dead bolt on my door?"
"Yes."
"Then no."
He disappeared.
She stood in the company of her suitcase and looked at the city, wondering how big silence could grow given enough vertical space.
She found him at 1:15 AM.
She hadn't been sleeping — new noises, new darkness, the city's light spilling through glass walls that provided no psychological barrier between her and a forty-two-floor drop. She'd arise for water, in her socks; she walked down the hall and halted at the door to the living room, because he was there.
Standing at the window.
Jacket off his shirt half-buttoned. A glass of whiskey still in his hand, not drinking from it, just holding the glass the way one holds things when one needs something to do with their hands. He was gazing at the city with a look she would have no way to articulate later — not the stony command of the booth, not the blunt effectiveness of the ceremony. Something open at the edges. Like a door left open by someone who hadn't thought to close it.
He heard her.
He didn't turn.
"Kitchen's to the right."
"I know." She did not head toward the kitchen. "James called me this evening. After we — " She waved vaguely at the air between them, signifying all of today. "He wanted to know if I'd gotten there O.K."
A fleeting invisible tension coursed along the line of Ares's shoulders.
"He sounded tired," she said.
"He is tired." His words came out in a slightly different pattern than his usual precision — lower, as though there were something compressive on them. "He's been tired for months. He just doesn't say it."
"He says a lot of things to me that he probably doesn't say to most people."
Ares was quiet for a moment.
"I know," he said. And there it was again — that subterranean thing, pressed so deep it came out in tone but never in vocabulary. Something next to grief and next to something sharper. "He tells you more than he tells me. He has for years." He paused for a long moment.
"He's comfortable with you. It's not something I engineered. It's something that we did and it was useful."
"That sounds like a very cold way to talk about your dying father's happiness," she added. Not unkindly. Just — honestly.
He turned then. Not all the way. Just enough for her to see the cut of his profile, the city light tracing the geometry of his face.
"Yes," he said. "It is."
And he said it without defense, which made it in a way worse.
She went to the kitchen. She was standing at counter drinking her water. She wondered what it meant to be that truthful about your own coldness — if it was self-revelation or capitulation or some third thing too new to have a name.
"Goodnight, Mr. Miller," she said.
"Ares," he said. From the living room. "OK, if we're married you can take my name."
She paused in the hallway.
"Goodnight, Ares," she said.
She walked to her room.