Free Living Witness by Jane Haddam

ingloomy days. He had chosen to spend his life in Philadelphia instead of the South, which was where most of his colleagues from the Bureau eventually retired. He had nothing against the South, as far as he knew. He had nothing against sunny days and temperatures that never dipped far below forty. He was just used to Philadelphia, that was all. He thought of it as home.
    Bennis Hannaford also thought of Philadelphia as home, which made sense, since her people had been here long before Gregor’s had. If America was a nation of immigrants, then people like Bennis relied on a lot of history to prove their immigrant status. In the case of the Hannafords, her father’s people, that meant an arrival date of 1689. In the case of the Days, her mother’s people, it was even earlier. Gregor could never remember if there had even been a colony of Pennsylvania when Bennis’s mother’s people arrived, but he didn’t dare ask, because Bennis would tell him. Bennis would be the first to point out that she had severed herself entirely from the tradition embodied in her father’s great house on the Main Line, but she could reel off the family history like the secretary-general of the
Social Register
.
    Did the
Social Register
have a secretary-general?
    Gregor had no idea. In the other room, Bennis was off the phone. He could hear her moving around, through the swinging doors that led to the kitchen and then back again. They talked frequently about connecting their apartments to make a duplex, but they never got around to it, and now it wouldn’t matter. He wondered what else wouldn’t matter, in the change that was coming as surely as the date of the wedding. He wondered about the wedding, too. It was March. He was hardly back from Margaret’s Harbor. The wedding was the first week of May. That had seemed like a long time only a couple of weeks ago, and now it seemed right here, right now, right away.
    Gregor was not having doubts about wanting to be married. He had wanted to marry Bennis for years. He was only having doubts about the way the world worked, and whether it could ever work in such a way as to make things come out right.
    He sat up and then swung his legs until they were out of the bedand on the floor. The bedroom was not so much a mess—he didn’t mind a mess; you could always clean a mess—as a tribute to chaos. There were long lengths of ribbon in a dozen colors over everything. Bennis kept changing the color she wanted for the flowers for the ceremony. There were at least two plaster of paris models of the Forest of Zedalinnia, which was a new locale in the book that would be coming out while they were supposed to be on their honeymoon, which was not going to be so much a honeymoon as a book tour. There were chocolates. Bennis said that the chocolates were to help her figure out which ones she wanted in the favors, but Gregor thought she’d made up her mind about that weeks ago and now only needed an excuse to make order after order from Box Hill. The orders came in purple boxes and the purple boxes were the same shade as at least one of the ribbons that kept getting into everything.
    I
can’t get married in six weeks
, Gregor thought, standing up. But that wasn’t actually true. He could get married right this minute. He could grab Bennis and take her off to Maryland or one of those places where you were supposed to be able to get married in no time flat, and that would be all right—that would be fine. It was the preparations that made him feel as if he were running out of air. It was that, and the questions they had never answered, the issues they had never resolved. Those were coming, and he knew it.
    Gregor got up and went in to the bathroom. His robe was lying across the top of the clothes hamper, looking damp. Bennis was always using his robes when he showered. Gregor shucked off his clothes and tried to make a list in his head of all the things that