Decca

“You did what?” Bethany’s jaw hung open as she slowly lowered the water bottle she was about to sip from.

I wasn’t surprised. She was the one I’d been dreading telling I was engaged.

“You heard me well enough. It’s true. No need to repeat it,” I said sullenly. “Besides, I don’t know how this trumps Soula’s news.”

“Nothing Soula does shocks me. She lives by the beat of a different drummer.” She turned to Soula, who was racing down the hall to catch a running Athena. “Obviously, congratulations, Soula. I love this for you.” She turned back to me. “You, on the other hand.” She rubbed her chest. “I feel like you just zapped the life back into me.”

“I should have started with clear.” I smiled and glanced down at my buzzing phone.

“At least let me see you rubbing the paddles together.”

It was a text from Gus.

G: Looking forward to dinner. Can you text me your address?

I texted him back, frowning at the words that highlighted the sheer weirdness of our situation. My fiancé didn’t know where I lived.

It was shocking. Especially for me. I didn’t do things like this. I didn’t have the self-confidence to propose marriage to a man out of the clear blue nothingness. Who did?

Bethany. She’d have the confidence to do something like that.

“You didn’t do some kind of black magic, did you?”

“No,” I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t opposed to black magic in principle, but I’d never use it, or any other type of magic to inflict my will on another human.

“What did the cards say?”

“How did you know I read the cards?”

“Because you don’t make any decisions without at least a quick card pull. And if you act impulsively, I know there’s got to be something behind that.”

I sighed, but leaned closer, my eyes wide. “The cards told me to act impulsively.”

“I knew there was something at the root of this. It’s so unlike you. You don’t swipe on someone on the dating apps until you’ve fully vetted them with their C.V. But why the suddenness? Why does it have to happen so fast? You recognize the high potential for disaster here, right?”

“He’s been itching to start his work in the church.”

“He’s already been working for the church.”

“He’s been fixing up their website, answering phones. Not in the official capacity. He wants to get ordained so he can start his ministry.”

“He doesn’t need to wear the robes in order to start his ministry. He can start counseling people. Everyone knows he’s a seminarian; that he’ll be a priest soon enough. It’s not like they aren’t taking him seriously in the meantime.

“I understand him. I want this to happen for him.”

“And what do you want for you?”

“What do you mean?”

“What kind of marriage do you want to have? Is this an I’m marrying you to stay in the country so we’re sleeping in separate bedrooms marriage? Or it is I’m proposing to be romantic because we’ve swept each other off our feet marriage?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should probably think about that before you sacrifice the rest of your life just so a dude can get his dream job a few months faster.”

“Well, I mean. It’s not my whole life. If it sucks, we can just—”

“No, you can’t,” Soula said, reentering the conversation after putting Athena down for a nap. She tightened her high ponytail. “At least not without him losing that dream job. What I don’t understand is why Gus would say yes. I know he wouldn’t want you to throw your life away for him. He’s not selfish like that.”

“I kind of took his response to mean he was interested in a bit more than just a marriage of convenience,” I said meekly. Now I was second guessing everything those damn tarot cards had shown me. “And what do you mean there’s no out?”

“Priests can’t get divorced. Well, they can, but only if their wives commit adultery. They usually don’t remain in the priesthood afterward.”

“Yeah, I could see why.”

“So,” Bethany prodded. “Figure out what you want. You’re a weird person—”

“Thank you.”

“Weird people make choices and they work for them. Besides, all three of us are weird. That’s why we’re family. If anyone can arrange themselves a marriage and have it last fifty years, it’d totally be you.”

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

I didn’t know what kind of engaged this was, but it wasn’t a good engaged. This felt more like a green card marriage than I’d planned for. It wasn’t something I’d relished telling my friends, but Bethany and Soula were more than friends. They were my family.

We’d met that first year of grad school at University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center. We’d all planned careers as forensic anthropologists, but after a short stint in the Body Farm, as the research facility’s commonly referred to, my friends were called down different paths.

Soula wanted her career to benefit the public health more than pure research or forensics. After finishing that first year, she left us to attend medical school at Vanderbilt. She spent the better part of the next decade completing the required training, internships, and fellowships to become a forensic pathologist. Last year, after her mentor retired, she was promoted to Chief Medical Examiner for Williamson County because she was brilliant. And beautiful, with her half Greek heritage, she and her brother George shared their light olive skin and tar black hair, though his was greyer by the month. But where he got his dad’s alleles for blue eyes, she inherited her mom’s inviting pools of deep brown. Her innocent expression and warm eyes sucked me in and we became fast friends.

Bethany left the FAC in December, for a faster escape route from the modeling work she was known for. The opposite of Soula, Bethany was fiery and gregarious. And also gorgeous. Soula was pretty in a way that was striking, more so when you got to know her dry sense of humor, but Bethany was objectively a knockout.

And the men’s nude magazines thought so too, at least enough to award her centerfold of the year—three times. She was already famous by the time she set her booted feet on the sacred ground of the Body Farm. But that didn’t mean she was a nepotism baby. She did all the science, all the readings, led discussions, and championed the work we were prepared to do once we graduated. But she has something to consider that the rest of us didn’t: sole custody of her four year old daughter, Sofia. And while Bethany continued doing the sex work she loved—she even started her own vintage-style nudie magazine—she wanted a career that would better help her transition out of the being in front of the camera.

Plus, she had a skill Soula and I lacked: she was great with living, breathing humans. She was comfortable in her own skin, warm, compassionate, and just generally made everyone feel like they could seek comfort with her. Bethany left to go to mortuary science school and get her embalmer’s and funeral director’s lisence. She worked various funeral homes in East Tennessee, staying close to me while building her resume until two years ago, when she finally had the chance to buy in to the funeral home she wanted. Smythe and Sons. Then she convinced prickly George to fall in love with her and now she and Soula are sisters.

That left me out there somewhere. I finished my Ph.D. in forensic anthropology at Tennessee, worked one hot and miserable year in Gainesville, Florida, and then I traveled back and forth across the state, from the mountains, where my people came from, to Memphis and back, living sometimes with Granny, here, just south of Franklin. Sometimes with Bethany when she was still in Knoxville. Not putting down any real roots but still plugging away at my job so I no one would notice I didn’t have a life of my own—especially me. Then Granny died and I even added more work. I moonlighted as a death doula when my cases slowed down. And while I didn’t love watching people die, I did love the challenge of helping them find a way to ease their minds as they transitioned on. I loved watching them pass in peace because, sometimes, people needed to do some hard work to feel okay leaving this plane, and I was the right kind of outside the box thinker who could be of use in that arena.

I worked on DMORT or Disaster Mortuary Operations Response Teams when there was a need. One thing about people in death care seemed true no matter how many different personalities existed. It wasn’t just that we were all willing to do the shit no one else wanted to do. It was that we were willing to put our own mental health on the line so no one on the front lines of life had to even think about the existence of our jobs. My old mentor used to say: If you can work in death care; you owe it to the world to do so, because we are few and far between. But even on the DMORT ops, I managed to find some spark of life. I worked with great people with big bellies and big laughs. The kind of people who cared but didn’t care for show.

So even though I went into the field of death care because I told myself I couldn’t stand the living, it was the living breathing people of death care who’d made my own life something spectacular.

But ultimately, I was tired of being alone. Bethany had George, and Soula had Waylon. Plus, one-and-a-half children, since she just shared the happy news that she was pregnant again.

“Soula,” Bethany twisted her body around in the corner of the sectional. “What do you think about this? He’s your brother. You know him best.”

“Decca probably knows him best now. They talk all the time. If she thought it could work, I trust her.”

“Phone conversations, no matter how lengthy or frequent, do not translate directly into marriage,” Bethany said.

“I’m just saying Decca probably knows what she’s getting into much better than we do. We’ve barely seen her since Gus graduated. Before that even. Since January, when he started coming home more.”

Bethany sipped her water. “Don’t we have any wine? Both of you give me great news and no one thinks to bring champagne?”

“I’m sure the pregnant woman wasn’t thinking about Champagne,” I said. But I got up to peruse Soula and Waylon’s wine fridge anyway, producing a bottle of buttery, unoaked chardonnay to split between Bethany and I. “And my news isn’t entirely celebration-worthy, as you’ve made perfectly clear.”

“Dec, I’m really sorry,” she came over to me to squeeze my hand. “You have my full support, no matter what. I’m not doubting you, although I know it sounds like it. I actually love you guys together. I just hoped it would happen more organically. Please know that even if I challenge you on this, it’s only because I want to know exactly what’s in your head. So, fight me on this. Convince me it isn’t crazy for you to propose to a man you’re not even dating. Because there might come a time—years or months down the road—when you’ll come to me to remind you of your own words. And you know I’ll be more than happy to tell you ‘I told you so.’”

“That’s not even true.” She wasn’t the only one doubting this, I just wanted her to be.

“I still can’t imagine you as a presvytera.” Soula said. “Are you really going to do the whole church thing?”

“I like his church. Except a few small but glaring issues, like women not being allowed in the priesthood, although none of the Greeks I’ve talked to seem to take offense to that, so it’s not really my issue. I mean, I won’t convert or anything, but I like the services. It’s not incompatible with my own spirituality and I appreciate the rituals. It’s way less puritanical and a lot more colorful. What do you mean presvytera, though? What’s that all about?

“Not really much anymore. The priest’s wife used to be a kind of First Lady of the church, leading the charities and things.”

“I can do that. I love charity.”

She grimaced.

“What’s that face for?”

“I’m just not sure how well the old ladies of the church are going to receive a witch as their priest’s wife. I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m very pro-arranged marriage. Statistics are good, especially if it’s not a true blind arrangement. I’m just warning you that it’ll be tough. Prepare yourself.”

“Do you have any advice for me? Help me navigate the church ladies?”

Soula blew her hair away from her face and thought for a moment. It looked like she hadn’t heard me, but I knew her well enough to know that was just her way. It took her a few moments to process before she responded.

“Be Greek.”