My ex-husband invited me to his wedding, so I hired an actor to be my plus-one.
My ex-husband invited me to his wedding, so I hired an actor to be my plus-one.
But the moment we walked in, my ex's face went white, and my "date" leaned down and whispered something that made my stomach drop.
Chapter 1: Hope You Can Come Alone
When the invitation came, I laughed so hard I almost dropped it.
It was a Tuesday afternoon in September, and I was standing at the mailbox in my work lanyard.
The paper was thick and cream-colored, with a raised gold border.
Mr. Derek Langford and Ms. Jocelyn Sinclair request the pleasure of your company.
My name was written across the envelope in calligraphy.
Not Tricia Langford.
Tricia Everhart, the name I had taken back eighteen months earlier, when the judge signed the decree.
Somebody had looked it up.
Somebody had wanted to get it exactly right.
This was the same man who had told me I was "too emotional."
Too ordinary.
"Not the kind of woman a successful man should be seen with."
He said all three on the same night, in the kitchen of the house on Magnolia Drive where I had cooked his dinner for twelve years, while he packed a suitcase and checked his Rolex.
I had stood there holding a dish towel, thinking, absurdly, that I should offer him a sandwich for the road.
And now he wanted me to sit quietly in the back row of a ballroom, in a pastel dress, while he married the woman he had left me for?
Absolutely not.
I almost threw it away.
My thumb was on the lid of the trash can when I noticed the little handwritten note on the back of the response card.
Blue ink.
His loopy, slanted, salesman's handwriting.
Hope you can come alone. It would mean a lot to me.
I read it three times.
That was when I knew exactly what he wanted.
He wanted to see me lonely.
He wanted me awkward and small and heartbroken at table fourteen, next to the cousin nobody liked, while the whole room whispered about how much he had upgraded.
He wanted a front-row seat to my misery.
So I did the only reasonable thing I could think of.
I hired an actor.
I should say that this was not entirely my idea.
It was Stacy's, my best friend since third grade, who taught drama at the high school and had been trying for a year to get me to stop eating dinner standing at the counter.
"There's a board at the community theater," she said, over wine and a bag of pretzels on my back porch. "Local actors. Actual professionals, half of them. They do corporate events, m*rder mystery parties, you name it. A plus-one is nothing."
"That's insane."
"Is it?" She raised an eyebrow. "He told you you weren't the kind of woman to be seen with. So go be seen."
I posted that night.
I was honest about the particulars, because I had never learned how to lie in a way that sounded real.
Wedding. October twelfth. The Grove Ballroom in Asheville. The groom was Derek Langford, the bride was Jocelyn Sinclair, and I needed a date who could look like he loved me for one evening.
I hit send, and I told myself it was a joke.
Nine minutes later, my phone buzzed.
Landon Kingsley.
He was thirty-nine.
I knew that because I asked, over coffee on a Saturday morning at a little place on Lexington Avenue, and he told me with a grin, as if it were funny.
Tall and lean, with dark hair going silver at the temples, a small scar through his left eyebrow, and the stillest eyes I had ever seen on a man.
He wore a plain gray sweater.
"I do a lot of jobs," he said, when I asked what he did. "Community theater, voice work, some set carpentry. I grew up in Chattanooga, in a woodshop. Everything I learned, I learned on a stage or a lathe."
We spent two hours rehearsing.
We had met on a hiking trail on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
He had asked me to dinner three times before I said yes.
He called me "Trish" in a warm, rumpled voice, and by the end of the second hour, I caught myself laughing, a real laugh, in a public place, in front of a stranger.
It was the first time in two years.
There was one habit I noticed, and ignored.
Halfway through our second coffee, he asked to see the invitation.
I slid it across the table.
He held it for a long moment, with his thumb on the bride's name.
Jocelyn Sinclair.
Then he handed it back, quietly.
"Do you have a photo of her?"
"Of the bride?"
"I should know who I'm walking past."
So I scrolled up my ex's public page, which I'd sworn to stop looking at, and showed him the engagement photo.
Derek in a navy suit, one hand on the small of her back.
Jocelyn, thirty-eight, honey-blond, with a dazzling, practiced smile and a large, square-cut diamond on her left hand.
Landon studied it for so long, I thought he might be memorizing her for the part.
"Pretty," he said, at last.
His voice didn't sound like his own.
There was a pale band of skin on his ring finger, where a ring had once been.
I noticed it, and I told myself that's what actors do.
They study the script.
At the door, he asked to see the invitation one more time, and held it, again, with his thumb on the same two words.
We shook on it before we left.
The night of the wedding, I wore a dress the color of red wine, a V-neck with a long, plain skirt, because Stacy had said, "Don't dress to impress him. Dress to remember yourself."
My hands shook in the car.
"Breathe," said Landon, from the driver's seat of his old pickup, as we pulled into the circular drive.
He'd put on a black suit and a black shirt, open at the collar.
He came around, opened my door, and offered his arm.
"Ready, Trish?"
"No."
"Perfect," he said. "Nobody's ever ready."
We walked in arm in arm.
The ballroom of the Grove was all white silk and candlelight, with crystal chandeliers, white roses on every table, and a string quartet playing something slow and sad in the corner.
A hundred and eighty guests, in silk and cashmere.
I felt my confidence come back with every step.
Heads began to turn.
Conversations stopped, one table at a time.
My ex's relatives went completely silent.
His mother, Roxanne Langford, stood by the champagne tower with a tan Hermès Birkin hanging from her elbow and a gold Cartier bracelet on her wrist, and her glass froze halfway to her lips.
For twelve years, I had been "Derek's little secretary."
I lifted my chin.
Then my ex finally saw us from across the room.
His face went white.
Not pale.
White, like paper.
The color drained out of him so fast, the glass in his hand tipped.
For a second, I thought, with a small, mean, glorious leap in my chest, that he was shocked I hadn't shown up miserable and alone.
I almost enjoyed it.
But then Landon's hand tightened around mine.
It wasn't a loving squeeze.
It was the grip of a man holding onto a railing.
He bent down, still smiling for the cameras, and leaned close to my ear.
I expected something flirtatious.
Something clever, for the audience.
Instead, he whispered five words, so low that no one else in that glittering room could hear.
"That woman is my wife."
My stomach dropped to the floor.
Chapter 2: The Other Mrs. Kingsley
I didn't scream.
I want that on the record.
I smiled, because a hundred and eighty people were watching, and I let Landon steer me with a warm hand at the small of my back toward the terrace doors, past the quartet, past Derek's cousin Heath, who nearly tripped over his own feet.
Out on the stone terrace, the October air was cold and sharp and smelled like woodsmoke and wet leaves.
Behind us, the glass doors swung closed on the music.
I pulled my arm out of his.
"Say that again."
"She's my wife," said Landon.
His voice was quiet and steady, but his hands were shaking, and he pushed them into his pockets.
"Her name isn't Jocelyn Sinclair. It's Misty Dawn Coker. We were married on June fourteenth, 2019, at the Hamilton County courthouse in Chattanooga. I've never been div*rced. Neither has she."
I stared at him.
I should have felt something clean and righteous.
Mostly, I felt sick.
"You're not an actor," I said slowly.
"I am an actor. I just wasn't here for the acting."
"Landon."
"Let me tell you the whole thing. Please. Then you can do whatever you want."
He told me.
His father had owned Kingsley Cabinet & Millwork, a forty-year-old family shop on the north side of Chattanooga.
When his father got sick, Landon came home to run it.
Misty had been the bookkeeper.
She was funny, warm, a little tragic, with a pretty laugh and an orphan's story that made you want to give her your coat.
They married in six months.
"Three years ago last March," he said, "I came in early and the books were empty. Two hundred and twelve thousand dollars, gone from the business account. And a second mortgage on my father's workshop that I never signed, with my signature on the line." He shut his eyes. "A forg*ry. Good enough to fool a notary. She left a note on the kitchen counter. Three words. 'I'm sorry, Lan.'"
"Did you go to the police?"
"Yes. They found a woman named Misty Coker had existed. After that, the trail went cold. She'd already stopped being her."
A string of fairy lights swayed over the terrace railing.
"My father d*ed last winter," Landon said. "The shop is two payments from a bank auction. I've spent three years and every penny I had looking for her. And on a Tuesday night in September, I was scrolling through the community theater board, because I couldn't sleep, and I saw your post."
My throat was tight.
"Wedding. October twelfth. Groom, Derek Langford. Bride, Jocelyn Sinclair. I read it, and I thought... I don't believe in coincidences. But I believe in a name that has no history before 2022."
"You used me."
It came out smaller than I intended.
"Yes," said Landon.
He didn't flinch.
"I'd been planning to walk in on my own. But Derek's security would have thrown me out at the door. But a woman on a date can." He took a breath. "I should have told you at the coffee shop. I wanted to. But I thought, if I tell her the truth, she'll walk."
"You wanted something from me."
"I did. I do." His voice cracked. "I'm sorry, Tricia. I'm so sorry. If you want me to leave, I'll walk out that gate right now, and you'll never hear from me again."
The terrace doors burst open.
Roxanne Langford marched out in a cloud of perfume, with the tan Birkin clutched against her ribs like a shield and the gold Cartier bracelet flashing at her wrist.
Two men in black blazers followed, wearing earpieces.
She didn't look at Landon.
She looked at me, from my plain red dress to my flat shoes, with the expression of a woman examining a stain on a tablecloth.
"So it's true," she hissed. "Jocelyn told Derek about that man. The monster who hurt her, the first husband who hunted her for three years. And you brought him here."
"Roxanne..."
"On my son's wedding day." Her voice rose, and heads inside the ballroom began to turn. "You always were pitiful, Tricia, but this is an obscenity. Hiring a thug off the street to frighten a girl you couldn't compete with. Derek was right about you. You are plain. You are ordinary. You couldn't hold a man's attention for twelve years, so now you'll make sure nobody else can either."
Landon took a step.
"Ma'am..."
"Don't speak to me." She flung up a hand. "Gentlemen. Remove them both."
The guards moved.
Behind the glass, I could see them now, a wall of faces.
I stood on the terrace in my wine-red dress, in the cold, with my ex-mother-in-law's finger an inch from my face, and I felt, for the first time in twelve years, no shame at all.
It had simply run out.
I looked at Roxanne, at the Birkin, at the bracelet, at the frightened, furious woman underneath.
"Roxanne," I said, quite calmly. "Is Derek signing anything tonight?"
She blinked.
"What?"
"Tonight. Is there a notary in that ballroom?"
Roxanne's mouth opened.
"It's a gift," she said, uncertainly. "Derek's adding Jocelyn to the deed on the house. He's doing it at the reception. In front of everyone. It's... romantic."
I turned to Landon.
He was already unbuttoning his jacket.
From an inside pocket, he pulled a flat plastic sleeve and held it out to me with both hands.
It was a certified copy of a marriage certificate.
Hamilton County, Tennessee.
Two names, a date, a raised state seal under my thumb.
"I don't need you to believe me," he said. "I need you to read it."
I read it twice.
Inside, the string quartet stopped playing, and the first low, solemn notes of the wedding processional began.
Chapter 3: If Any Person Present
We went back in through the kitchen.
I don't remember deciding to.
One moment I was on the terrace with a plastic sleeve in my hands, and the next I was moving past steam tables and stacked sheet pans, with Landon a step behind me and the two men in earpieces, strangely, not stopping us.
We came out through a service door at the back of the ballroom, behind the last row of white chairs, just as the music swelled.
Everyone had risen.
A hundred and eighty people turned to face the aisle.
At the far end, under an arch of white roses, stood my ex-husband in a black tuxedo with a gold Rolex winking at his cuff.
Beside him, the officiant, a silver-haired retired judge named Ames, who had golfed with Derek's father for thirty years, held a leather book against his stomach.
Down the aisle, in a dress the color of cream, with a cathedral train and a four-carat Harry Winston on her left hand, came the bride.
She was alone.
She had told everyone she was an orphan.
She smiled at the guests as she passed, a luminous, practiced smile.
Her eyes found me by the back wall, the plain woman in the red dress, and something flickered across her face too fast to read.
Then she smiled again, and kept walking.
I stood against the wall with my heart pounding in my ears.
Landon didn't move.
He had gone absolutely still, with his hands at his sides, the way you do when a bear walks into a clearing.
She reached the arch.
Derek took her hands.
The judge opened his book.
He talked about love, and about patience, and about two lives becoming one.
It was warm in the room, and the roses smelled sweet and a little sour, like a fun*ral parlor.
I could feel the plastic sleeve sticking to my damp palm.
"If anyone here," said the judge, in the old, slow, solemn phrases, "knows of any lawful reason why these two persons may not be joined in marriage, let them speak now, or forever hold their peace."
It is a line everyone knows.
It is a line nobody has ever taken seriously.
I thought, for one second, of the kitchen on Magnolia Drive.
Too ordinary.
I thought of the cream-colored envelope.
Hope you can come alone.
Then I raised my hand.
"I do."
It was not loud.
It didn't need to be.
In a silence like that, a whisper carries to the ceiling.
A hundred and eighty heads turned.
Derek's face, which had been wet and radiant, went blank.
"Tricia?" he said.
"Sit down," said Roxanne, from the front row, in a strangled hiss.
"I'm not here about myself," I said.
My voice shook, and then, to my astonishment, it steadied.
"I'd like that understood. I didn't come to ruin your day, Derek. I came because there's a legal reason why this marriage can't take place. And you deserve to hear it before you sign anything."
I walked up the aisle.
It was eighty feet long.
It felt longer than the twelve years I'd spent in that man's house.
Nobody stopped me.
Phones were out all over the room, a small constellation of glowing rectangles, but nobody made a sound.
Landon walked a step behind me.
When Roxanne saw him, she started to scream, and then someone beside her, I think her husband, took her wrist, and she stopped.
I stopped at the front, three feet from the arch.
I held up the plastic sleeve.
"This is a certified copy of a marriage certificate from Hamilton County, Tennessee," I said. "It's dated June fourteenth, 2019. The parties are Landon James Kingsley and Misty Dawn Coker. There is a raised county seal and a clerk's number on the bottom, and the judge is welcome to call the courthouse in the morning."
The judge took the sleeve.
He slid out the paper.
He read it carefully, with his glasses at the end of his nose, and I watched his face change.
"The seal is genuine," he said slowly.
"Your Honor," the bride said, brightly, "this is absurd. That man is my abusive ex. He's been stalking me for years. Derek, tell them. I showed you his photo."
"Ms. Sinclair," said the judge, quietly. "Were you ever married in the state of Tennessee?"
"No."
"Never?"
"Never!" Her voice cracked, high and brittle. "He forged that. He's dangerous. Get him out of here. Derek..."
Landon hadn't moved.
He stood with both hands open at his sides, so that everyone could see them.
He didn't raise his voice.
"Mist," he said gently.
"Don't call me..."
"Mist. It's been three years. Please."
And then she did the thing I will remember for the rest of my life.
She turned her head toward him, and the color left her face, and her lips parted, and out of her mouth, soft, automatic, in a tone she'd spent three years training out of her voice, came a single word.
"Lan?"
The room made a sound.
It was not a gasp, exactly.
More like a hundred and eighty people letting out a breath they'd forgotten they were holding.
She had heard it as soon as she said it.
Her hand flew to her mouth.
But a word can't be put back in a mouth.
"Lan," repeated the judge, almost to himself. "Just as it is written on the certificate. 'Landon J. Kingsley, known as Lan.'"
Beside him, my ex-husband stood motionless in his tuxedo.
His eyes were going from the certificate to the bride, and from the bride to the man who had been standing beside me.
I watched him understand.
It took about four seconds.
Four of the longest seconds I've ever lived.
Behind us, at the head table, a woman with a notary stamp sat with a manila folder open in front of her.
The deed to the house on Magnolia Drive, with a blank line, and a pen laid neatly beside it.
Derek looked at it.
His mouth moved.
"Jocelyn," he said, in a whisper. "Who are you?"
She didn't answer.
She did the only thing left.
She gathered her cream-colored skirts in both fists, turned, and ran.
She ran down the white aisle in a cathedral train and bare feet, kicking off her heels as she went, past a hundred and eighty frozen faces, toward the double doors at the back.
And the two men with earpieces, the ones Roxanne had told to remove us, stepped into the doorway and folded their arms.
Chapter 4: The Only Real Thing in the Building
One of the men in the doorway didn't have an earpiece.
He was a big, gray-haired guest in a rented tuxedo, and he had simply gotten up from his table and stood in front of the exit with his arms crossed.
"Ma'am," he said, as gently as a man could say it to a bride in bare feet. "I'd stay put."
His name was Greg Ingram.
He was a sergeant with the Asheville police, off duty, and he had roomed with Derek in college.
He took one look at the certificate in the judge's hand and another at the clutch she was clinging to.
"Mind if I see what's in the bag?"
She did mind.
She said so, loudly, and then not so loudly, and then not at all.
Inside the clutch were three driver's licenses.
Jocelyn Sinclair.
Misty Coker.
And a third name I'd never heard, with a Georgia address and the same smile.
Nobody in that ballroom said a word.
The string quartet had stopped mid-note, one violinist still holding her bow in the air.
Roxanne's champagne glass slid out of her fingers and rang against the marble floor.
She didn't look down.
She stared at her Birkin, then at her gold Cartier bracelet, then at the bride she had been so proud of, as if she was hoping one of them would explain.
None of them did.
Sergeant Ingram called it in quietly.
The notary closed her folder without a word and slid it into her bag.
I was still standing at the altar rail in my wine-red dress, with my heart going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
My hands had started to shake.
Landon was beside me.
He hadn't moved since she'd run.
He had waited three years to see that woman's face again, and now that he had, he looked like a man who'd been carrying a piano up a staircase and had suddenly been told to put it down.
"Are you okay?" I asked him.
He let out a sound that was half a laugh.
"I was going to ask you the same thing."
"Tricia."
I turned.
Derek had come up behind us.
His tie hung loose, and the white had not left his face.
He looked at Landon.
Then at me.
"Can we talk? Just us. Please."
I almost said no.
Landon touched my elbow.
"I'll be right outside that door," he said. "Take as long as you want."
There was a small side room off the ballroom, where the caterers kept their coats.
It smelled like lemon polish and warm sugar.
Derek sat down on a folding chair, which looked wrong on a man in a tuxedo, and stared at his hands.
"She told me he was dangerous," he said. "She said her first husband had hurt her. That he'd tracked her to three states."
"So when you saw him walk in with me..."
"I thought you'd brought him on purpose." He swallowed. "I thought you'd found out something about her, and you were about to ruin the best night of my life."
"And what would that have looked like?"
"Honestly?" He gave a small, ugly laugh. "Like exactly what happened."
I waited.
Twelve years of marriage had taught me the kind of silence that makes Derek talk.
"The note," he said finally.
"Hope you can come alone."
He winced.
"I wrote that."
"I know. It was your handwriting."
"I wanted you there." His voice cracked. "I wanted you in the back row, Tricia. I wanted you to see me happy. I wanted somebody who'd known me before the Rolex to see that I'd made it."
"And you couldn't ask me that honestly?"
"I called you ordinary," he said. "I said that to people. For years."
"You did."
"I married an actress." He looked up at me, and his eyes were wet. "I stood up in front of a hundred and eighty people and promised my life to a woman who was acting. And the only real thing in that building was you."
I should tell you that part of me wanted to enjoy it.
I had imagined that sentence for eighteen months.
But when it finally came, I didn't feel victorious.
I just felt tired, and a little sorry for him.
"The notary was here for the house," I said quietly. "My house."
"She told me it was just paperwork. A formality for the marriage."
"It was your name on that deed, Derek. And mine, for the next six months, until the buyout cleared. If you'd signed, and she'd gotten her name on it, she could have taken a lien out against it in a week."
He put his face in his hands.
"That's what she did to him," I said. "Landon's father lost his workshop because she did exactly that."
I let him sit with it.
Then I stood.
"Why did you do it?" he asked into his palms. "Bring him. Why would you even go to the trouble?"
I thought about how to answer.
About the wine-red dress, and the nine minutes it had taken Landon to answer my post, and the way he'd asked about the invitation twice.
"At first, to make you jealous," I said. "That's the truth. I'm not proud of it."
"And after?"
"After, I found out someone else was being fooled the way I was. And nobody should have to sit in the back row of their own life while somebody lies to them."
Roxanne caught me in the hallway.
She was standing with her Birkin hanging off her wrist like something she'd forgotten she owned.
For a long moment she didn't say anything at all.
Her lipstick had smeared.
"You told me I was plain," I said.
"I..." She straightened. Then her shoulders came down, an inch at a time. "I did."
"And ordinary."
"Yes."
"Hiring a thug, I think, was the other one."
Roxanne closed her eyes.
"I'm sorry," she said. It sounded like a word she hadn't used in thirty years. "That was cruel, and I was wrong."
I nodded once.
I didn't say it was fine.
It wasn't.
But I let her stand there, and she let me walk past, and that was as close as the two of us were ever going to get.
Landon was leaning on the wall outside, hands in his pockets, watching the last of the guests file through the lobby.
Through the glass doors, a patrol car sat under the porte-cochère with its lights turning slowly, red and blue on the wet pavement.
When I came out, he straightened.
"Well," he said.
"Well."
We stood in the quiet and watched the lights go around.
After a minute he said, "I owe you a very long explanation and a very large dinner."
I looked at the wine-red dress.
Then I looked at him.
"And I get dessert," I said.
Chapter 5: Bring Whoever You Like
Her real name was Misty Dawn Coker, and she had used four others.
The arr*st in Asheville was only the first one.
By January, prosecutors in Tennessee and Georgia had lined up behind the North Carolina case.
Derek testified.
He told me afterward that it was the hardest thing he had ever done, and that he'd done it standing up straight.
I believed him.
He sold the big house on Magnolia Drive, as we'd agreed, and moved into a small apartment closer to work.
Once, at the grocery store, he saw me by the apples and simply nodded.
No speech, no smirk.
I nodded back.
It felt like closing a door that had been left open too long.
The restitution hearing was in March.
When the judge read out the figure, $212,000 plus the forg*ry on the second mortgage, Landon didn't move.
Then his shoulders dropped, and I realized he had been holding them up for three years.
Two months later, the shop got its deed back.
He called me from the parking lot of the title company, and he couldn't get a full sentence out.
"It's still there," he kept saying. "Dad's workbench. It's still there."
I drove to Chattanooga that weekend.
Kingsley Cabinet & Millwork smelled like cedar and sawdust and fresh varnish, and it was the best smell I had ever walked into.
Landon showed me around the way you'd show someone your childhood bedroom.
Here was where his father had taught him to square a joint.
Here was a scorched mark on the floor from the winter he turned fifteen and tried to build a go-kart.
I told him about fourteen years of answering phones and never once feeling that anything I did was built to last.
He never said I was wrong to feel it, and he never tried to fix it.
Three weeks later, a flatbed delivery truck pulled up in front of my little rented house.
On the back sat a bench.
It was solid white oak, with a high curved back and armrests worn smooth as river stones.
Landon climbed down from the cab with sawdust in his hair.
"Porch," he said. "You told me you didn't have anywhere to sit in the evenings."
I put my hand on the armrest.
It was warm from the sun.
"It's too much," I said.
"It's one bench." He grinned. "I own a woodshop. I'm told it's what we do."
We sat on it that night until the porch light came on.
He didn't kiss me.
Not that night, not that month.
He held my hand once, in June, when a firefly landed on the rail.
We were in no hurry.
That was exactly why it felt true.
In October, one year after the wedding that wasn't, I drove back up to Chattanooga for opening night.
The Lookout Players were doing a little production of Our Town, and Landon had a part: the Stage Manager, narrating from the front of an almost empty stage.
Stacy sat next to me in the third row, squeezing my arm so hard it left a mark.
There was a program on my seat.
Tucked inside it was an envelope, with my name on the front in a hand I'd learned to recognize.
Inside was a single card.
"Hope you can come. Bring whoever you like."
I looked up.
He was already on stage, standing in the half-light, one hand in his pocket.
And I knew he had written that note so the line could finally mean what it was supposed to.
When the play ended, he came off stage and found me in the lobby.
"So," he said, still wearing the costume jacket. "What did you think?"
"You were very convincing."
"I wasn't acting."
"I know." I smiled. "You've never been any good at it with me."
He laughed.
Then, for the first time, he kissed me, softly, in front of the whole lobby.
A few people clapped, and an old woman by the coat rack said, "About time."
I still have the invitation from the Grove Ballroom, with Derek's handwriting at the bottom.
It sits in a drawer, under the wine-red dress.
Sometimes I take it out and read it.
"Hope you can come alone."
I used to think the worst thing a person could say to me was that I was ordinary.
Now I know better.
Ordinary is a woman who answers the phone every morning at 7:40, who remembers the name of every kid in the building, who shows up when someone is falling.
Ordinary is what holds everything else up.
May you like
And sitting on my porch bench with a man who has sawdust in his hair and my hand in his, I have never felt so completely, wonderfully, unmistakably ordinary in my life.
THE END
