His Temporary Wife

In the twilight of his life, steel-veined patriarch Howard Eliot—half-mummified by silk sheets and the scent of iodine—watches the candle of his pulse gutter while a lambent nurse, Annabelle Rose, tends the wick with ungloved grace. The dying magnate, intoxicated less by morphine than by her unbuyable kindness, presses into her palm a sealed envelope whose paper still holds the Ferris-wheel warmth of his fingertips, whispering a calendar of sixty blank days before revelation. The rest of his gilded empire he catapults toward his blasé son Arthur, but only on the poisoned proviso that the heir sever himself from Verna Devore, a panther in mink who hums currency the way other women hum lullabies. To neuter Verna’s fangs, Arthur drafts a matrimonial want-ad that reads like a ransom note for respectability. Annabelle—whose purse now contains only dust and trolley tokens—steps out of the charity ward and into the lace veil of a contract bride, signing her name beside Arthur’s on a license that both pretend is parchment, not promise. What follows is a housebound waltz: two strangers sharing a surname, a breakfast table, and the slow dawning that a ring hollow in the middle can still cut blood flow to the heart. On the dawn of the sixtieth sunrise, the envelope yawns open; its ink reveals that Annabelle, not Arthur, is the true heiress to the Eliot constellation of mills, mansions, and midnight oil. The fortune Arthur believed he was safeguarding slips like quicksilver into the hands of the woman who has already begun to rewire his desires. In that instant the contract dissolves, but the marriage—once a paper moon—hardens into silver truth, leaving Arthur both bankrupt and reborn, clutching a wife who is no longer temporary yet forever unattainable by any ledger.