The contract was fourteen pages, and Nora read every one of them twice, which seemed to unsettle him more than anything she'd said the night before.
"Most people skim," Adrian said.
"Most people haven't been deposed."
They were in his kitchen, which was the size of her entire apartment and had the temperature of a bank. Everything in it was the color of expensive nothing — bone, ash, unsalted butter. There was one mug in the drying rack. One. She found that detail more revealing than the fourteen pages.
"Clause nine," she said.
"Separate bedrooms. Yes."
"Clause nine says separate bedrooms where practical." Nora looked up. "Where isn't it practical?"
A muscle moved in his jaw. "My mother visits in October. The house has staff. Staff talk." He said it flatly, a man listing weather. "Eighteen days a year, we'd share a room. Not a bed — there's a couch. I've slept on it. It's fine."
"You've slept on it."
"There was a stretch last year when I preferred it to my own bedroom," he said, and then stopped, and did not say which stretch, or why, and Nora did not ask him to.
She signed at 11:40 in the morning.
The pen was heavy — a real one, the kind that had to be filled — and her signature came out wrong, too small, a stranger's. Adrian signed beneath it without reading anything at all, which she pointed out.
"I wrote it," he said.
"You wrote clause nine?"
"I wrote all of them." He capped the pen. "Including the one that says I take nothing of yours — not what you brought, not what you earn, not afterwards. And that if you want out at any point, at any point, you say the word and it ends and you keep every penny of what I agreed to pay you."
Nora looked at page eleven again. It said exactly that.
"Why?"
"Because I'm asking you to lie to four hundred people for a year," Adrian said, "and the only way I sleep at night is if you can leave."
The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere below them the city carried on being a place where she was, for eleven more days, a name in a filing.
"Okay," said Nora Vance.
The courthouse on Friday was a room with strip lighting and a radiator that ticked, and there were three couples ahead of them, and one of them had brought balloons.
She had not accounted for other people being happy in the room.
Adrian wore a suit that had clearly been made for him some years ago by somebody who had enjoyed the work. Nora wore the only dress she owned that did not belong to the version of her life currently being subpoenaed. Neither of them said anything about the other, which she noticed, and minded slightly, and was angry with herself about.
The clerk was called Denise. She had done several thousand of these and was kind in the particular way of a woman who has watched everything twice.
The vows took ninety seconds. Nora heard her own voice saying the words and thought about the four months of rooms she had sat in this year saying true things that helped nobody, and how this was the first outright lie, and how much easier it was coming out.
Then Denise said, "You may kiss."
Neither of them had planned for that.
She watched it land on him — the man who had written fourteen pages, who had thought of the staff and the mother and the eighteen days in October, and had not thought of this.
"We don't have to —" he said, barely moving his mouth.
"There are three couples watching," Nora said, "and one of them has balloons."
"Yes."
"Adrian."
"Yes."
He put his hand along the side of her face, which nobody had asked him to do, and kissed her.
It lasted four seconds. It happened under strip lighting in front of a woman called Denise, next to a radiator that ticked. By any reasonable standard it was a formality, and Nora Vance had every intention of treating it as one.
Four seconds. It's paperwork. This is the single least significant thing that has happened to me this year.
She came out of it with a fistful of his coat and no memory at all of having decided to do that.
They stepped apart. He looked at her for slightly too long.
"Right," said Adrian.
"Right," said Nora.
That was not paperwork.
"Congratulations," said Denise, and meant it, and neither of them corrected her.