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future on a gushing current of love and desire. Instead I was growing heavier by the day, gravity pinning me to this new reality.
    BUT HE WAS RIGHT; I
did
need health insurance. At home in the middle of the day while he was at work, I looked around me and realized I wanted this home to belong to both of us; I wanted to claim its oak floors and painted-shut windows, the clover spreading through the overgrown grass, the creaking rocker, and the lazy, swirling fan on the porch. So I agreed to go to the courthouse with him—in secret, just the two of us. I insisted that the papers we signed would not mean anything to me—that only a real wedding, with a dress and a cake and music and a party with loved ones, would bind us.
    On a weekday morning we drove to the county seat in Hillsborough, a small town with a sleepy main street and an old-fashioned courthouse. A woman shaped like a wedding cake sat behind a narrow desk: her fair, round face stacked onto her white neck, above a broad, spongy bosom that gave way to a buttercream middle. She slipped forms across the counter for us to complete—boxes to check, numbers to provide, blank spaces to fill in, and signatures to authorize in order for our love to be processed and packaged into legal responsibilities and financial benefits.
    After we had completed the forms, she gestured for us to sit down in a nearby waiting area, which was empty except for two young people who looked like they were playing hookie from high school. A blonde girl who had not yet lost her baby fat snapped her gum so fiercely that it sounded like a cap gun. Beside her sat a young man in a baseball cap, the brim tucked low over his face, concealing his eyes. He stretched his long legs in front of him, the knees of his blue jeans the rust color of North Carolina clay, his unlaced work boots crossed over each other. He looked like he was planning a deer hunt for their honeymoon, and they would be leaving directly from the courthouse.
    We four sat in silence, contemplating the carpet, glancing now and then at one another with mutual suspicion, like people stuck together in a holding tank at the county jail—stunned at the unexpected turn their lives have taken, waiting to be released from this shame, convinced that everyone else inside is more messed up and dangerous than they are. None of us could have dreamed that our wedding day would look like this or that we would be the witnesses to one another’s marriages. I sat brooding under those fluorescent lights, silently interrogating my doubts. This sterile waiting room, with its coarse matching chairs and health pamphlets on the side table, made me feel like a patient seeking a diagnosis and a cure for this love that was wreaking havoc in my life. The stack of paperwork on the clipboard, all those checkboxes I had marked and blanks I had filled in, made my affection for Ismail seem like a loan I would be repaying later with interest.
    On a side table, a woman with a black eye and a recriminating gaze stared up at me from a pamphlet, beneath the words LOVE SHOULDN’T HURT in bold, black type
.
I reached for the pamphlet and stared uncomprehending at those words as if they were written in a foreign language. Love like an anvil had cracked my locked heart open and unleashed an excruciating flow of tenderness. To rise to the occasion of this love was to endure the sting of daily misunderstandings and the terror of this unexpected pregnancy. There was the fear of the unknown as well as the pain of severing from my past and letting go of fantasies about my future. From where I stood, trying to imagine love without hurt was like trying to imagine the ocean without waves: without it, we would be talking about a whole different body of water, smaller and shallower and safer.
    I stared blankly at the pamphlet as the final moments of my single life slipped past. Ismail held my hand in his, stroking the back of my palm with jittery fingers.
    “Mr. Soo-yah?” Four heads