The room was larger than the apartment where five laborers shared one bathroom. Larger than your parents’ whole house back home. Heavy curtains. Cream walls. A bed wide enough to lose yourself in. A tray of chocolate-covered strawberries and champagne none of this evening had earned.
Vivian was already sitting on the edge of the bed when you entered.
She had changed out of the gown and into a pale blue nightshirt that fell loosely around her body. Her hair was down now, thick and dark against her shoulders. Without the public armor of the dress and the reception smile, she looked younger and somehow more fragile, though not weak. Fragility and weakness are not the same. You knew that from the women back home who carried water in buckets and still sang.
“Close the door,” she said gently.
You did.
For a moment neither of you spoke.
You had promised yourself you would be decent. That whatever ugliness this marriage contained, you would not add to it by being cruel or crude or visibly disgusted. You had spent days preparing for discomfort, for duty, for the possibility that the bed itself would feel like a transaction stamped in flesh.
Vivian kept her hands folded in her lap.
“You don’t have to force anything tonight,” she said. “Or ever, if we can come to terms. My father has his reasons for wanting appearances. I have mine for wanting peace.”
You stared at her.
She gave a small, humorless smile. “I’m not stupid. And I’m not sentimental.”
The honesty of that hit harder than pity would have.
You stepped closer slowly. “I said yes.”
“Yes,” she replied. “For a house and a truck and a future. I know.”
There was no accusation in it. That made it worse.
You sat beside her on the bed, leaving distance between you. “I will try to be a good husband.”
She looked down at her hands. “That would already make you better than most men who claimed they wanted me.”
You did not know what that meant. Not yet.
The room had gone very quiet. Outside the windows, traffic hummed several floors below. Somewhere in another suite a muffled laugh broke and disappeared. Vivian’s breathing was steady, but you could feel tension in the space around her like a wire pulled too tight.
Then she said, almost casually, “There’s something you should see before you decide what kind of husband you can be.”
She lay back slowly and pulled the blanket over herself, then nodded once toward the edge of it. “Go on.”
