Overnight Wife

I lay it all out. How I feel about him, which came out of nowhere, as unexpected as the wild night that led to our marriage. And I end with how I’m feeling now—like this could be the same situation. Something wild and unexpected… but right. Something that could improve both our lives, as long as we keep our priorities straight. As long as we’re both all in.

When I finish, signing it feels wrong. So I draw something instead. It’s been a while since I’ve set ink to paper—I used to sketch out all my set designs in detail before I worked on them, but nowadays I work from computer renderings instead. Still, it comes back to me easily enough, with the pen in my hand.

I draw John, the way I remember him best. Lying beside me in bed, his dark eyes steady and fixed on mine. Reassuring me that whatever happens, he’ll be here for me.

Just like I’ll be here for him, no matter what happens now. No matter where this news takes the two of us in life.

When I’m finished, I leave the card sitting open on my dashboard and root around for the card’s envelope. When I find it, I tuck it inside and write on the front in swirling script, John’s name. Then I grab my purse and move to climb out of my car, only to let out a gasp of surprise.

Bianca is standing outside my car, her eyes huge and round with shock, fixed on me.

No. Fixed on the card in my hand.

She moves back as I shove open my door and climb out of the car. I expect her to run away, the way she’s been doing around me ever since the night she hit on John. But she stands her ground, to my surprise, and fixes her attention on the envelope in my hand instead. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry, but I was walking past, and I saw you… you seemed a little ill, so I came to check…” But she doesn’t meet my gaze. She just stares at the envelope in my hand, with John’s name on the front. “Did I read that right?” she asks. “Are you pregnant?”

The fear and worry I’ve been battling all day turn to jagged rocks in my stomach. I press the card over my heart, like that can shield me. “What do you want?” I snap.

Her cheeks flush. “I wanted to apologize,” she says, and it’s so far from what I expected that my eyebrows shoot upward.

“What?”

She clears her throat, and finally, finally, drags her eyes up to meet mine. “I’m sorry. About what happened with John and me. I’m sure he told you; I was just so embarrassed about it all… I thought he was flirting with me; clearly, I was wrong. I shouldn’t have made a move.” Her eyes drift to the envelope again. “Do you need anything? Can I help somehow?”

But I shake my head, moving away from her. She may have apologized for hitting on John—for misreading his signals, supposedly—but that doesn’t change the fact that she hit on him after she found out he and I were married. Even if our marriage was a sham, where is the respect in that?

And then there’s the last week at work. A whole week where she ignored me, refused to even acknowledge anything had happened. And now she wants to apologize and act like everything is fine… why? Because she found out I’m pregnant? Because she pities me? “I’m fine,” I say coldly, turning toward the building.

“Good luck,” she calls behind me, but I know her well enough to hear the catch in her tone. The insincerity.

Screw her. Screw her advice, her telling me that everyone at Pitfire thinks I married John for this job. They don’t know anything, and neither does she.

Back in the building, I tuck the card into my purse, planning to give it to John later tonight. Once everyone else clears out of the building. For now, I have work to do, and thanks to my much longer than usual morning break at the pharmacy, I’ll be playing catch-up.

I bypass the workshop for once and head straight into the theater. We’ve been hard at work creating all the pieces for this play, but this week, we’ll be starting to actually assemble the stage itself. It’s an exciting step, usually my favorite part of set design. It’s when all the pieces you’ve labored on so much, all the disparate puzzle pieces stacked up inside your head, finally join together on stage into something that starts to resemble a real theater. It’s when your imagination finally gets to come to life.

But today, I’m distracted. I force a smile and a wave for Daniel, and chat to a few of our stage hands about the order of setup. I want to get the background design right first, before we start adding the smaller set pieces to it. There’s one in particular, a moving set piece, that I’m worried about making fit. It needs to be suspended over the stage on wires, but accessible, because at one part of the play, toward the end of the second act, it needs to be able to move—to swing into the set, and be sturdy enough for one of the actors to climb onto it. It’s supposed to look like a series of stars in the night sky, at least until it swings down and reveals itself to be a chariot made out of shooting stars.