The Accidental Honeymoon

A headstrong debutante, Kitty, flees the suffocating velvet of an arranged engagement, her Packard slicing through moon-dusted backroads until the engine coughs itself into silence beside a semaphore of wheat. On the same forsaken stretch, Robert—canvases spurned, heart flayed open by a femme fatale’s perfumed rebuff—stretches his frame across iron rails, inviting the midnight locomotive to finish what whiskey could not. Their trajectories collide: her stalled headlights catch the tremor of his suicide, his latent gallantry overrides despair, and suddenly two fugitives—one from society, one from self—share a grease-smudged fender like conspirators. The resurrected automobile sputters to a clapboard farmhouse whose owner, drunk on his own bucolic certainty, installs the “newlyweds” in a rose-papered chamber whose single bed becomes both battleground and confessional. At dawn, the father’s Packard roars up the lane, top hat bristling with patriarchal thunder; the door swings wide to reveal Kitty in a man’s oversized shirt, Robert barefoot, the quilt still warm with counterfeit sin. What follows is a choreography of threats, bribes, shotguns, ink-stained sketchbooks, and a justice-of-the-peace hurriedly summoned from a hay-bale pulpit—each twist tightening the corset of social farce until the only escape is a truth so implausible it must be love.