By nine on Friday morning there were two hundred and twelve women in white dresses on the steps of the Marren County Courthouse, and at least forty of them had brought folding chairs.

Dilly saw them from the back of the grey hatchback, through a gap in the curtain Junie had rigged across the rear window out of a tablecloth. She did not like what she saw. It was not the women, who were laughing and passing round thermoses and doing each other's hair, or the little boy on a man's shoulders holding a sign that said GO DILLY in purple marker. It was the angles. The courthouse steps were a funnel, wide at the bottom, narrow at the doors, with a stone balustrade on both sides and a clock tower overhead with a clear line of sight down onto the whole thing. Her father would have called it a very pretty place to lose a person.

"You are doing the exits," said Hester, from the seat beside her.

"I'm admiring the architecture."

"You are doing the exits with your whole face." Hester, in a borrowed navy dress and the plum cardigan, had a needle in her lips and a spool in her hand. She had been sewing since six that morning in the Karimov kitchen, and she was sewing now, a last hem, the white cotton dress on Dilly's knees that Gulnora had bought off a rail in the Tally Market for thirty-one dollars and then taken apart and put back together with sleeves. "Hold still. You've got a pulled thread, and I will not be the woman who let you be photographed with a pulled thread."

"There's nobody photographing."

Hester gave her a look over the glasses. Outside, three phones were raised in one motion, like sunflowers.

From the front seat, Gulnora said something in Uzbek. She was in her good green coat, with her hair pinned flat and a small black handbag held on her lap in both hands. She had not said much since they left Dray Street. She had spent the morning ironing, and arranging cups, and instructing Rustam on how to hold a phone steady, which he had been doing since seven, in the passenger footwell, talking in a low urgent murmur to forty-one viewers who by now numbered nine thousand.

"She says," said Rustam, not looking up, "that you've got to stop pulling at the collar."

"I'm not."

"You are. I've got it in the corner of the shot. Hello, everyone, yes, that's my sister, don't be weird about it. She has a thing about collars." A pause. "Mum says you look like Baba's wedding photo. I'm only passing it on."

Dilly looked at her mother's neck, the back of her mother's head. The hair pinned flat. She said, "Mum."

Gulnora turned round. Her face was entirely calm. She opened the little handbag, took out a folded handkerchief, and unfolded it, and in the middle of it, on the cotton, lay a plain silver ring, narrow, a little dented on one side, with a tiny scratch on the inner band where something had once caught it.

"For him," Gulnora said, in English, so that Hester would understand. "He forgot his. I have not forgotten mine."

Nobody said anything. Even Rustam's murmur stopped. The traffic went by outside, and a woman laughed on the steps.

"That's Dad's," said Dilly.

"Your father wore it on the van for sixteen years. It is not a delicate ring." Gulnora folded the handkerchief back around it and pressed it into Dilly's hand, and closed Dilly's fingers on it with her own. They were dry and warm and smelt of starch. "It is a working ring. It has driven many miles. Give it to the boy. If he loses it, I will know what kind of man he is, and so will you."

"It's a one-year contract, Mum."

"Then he will have a year to take good care of it." She faced front again. "Come. We will be late. I wish to sit down."

* * *

They went in through the judges' side door, on Dilly's insistence, with Pascual's replacement at the wheel, a sour young man named Ilan from Eun-ji's firm who drove as if the car were a loaded cheque. Sel was waiting in the corridor outside courtroom three, with Junie, and Eun-ji, and Margit, who was wearing her grey wool and a small white carnation, the only concession to the day.

Sel was in a charcoal suit that fitted him. That was the first thing she noticed, and the second was that he had put on weight since the night in the laundromat, a few pounds, enough to soften the edges of his face. He was holding a yellow tulip in one hand, a single bloom with a broken stem, and when he saw her he looked down at it with such open embarrassment that her chest hurt.

"I had a bouquet," he said. "Bettina made it. It was extremely good. I left it on the car roof and Ilan drove off with it."

"It's on Dray Street," Junie said. "Someone posted it. Fifty thousand views. The bouquet's famous. It's got its own hashtag."

"I'm very glad for it."

Dilly stepped forward. She opened her mother's handkerchief and took out the ring and held it up between them, in the grey corridor light, and he looked at it and did not move.

"This is my father's," she said. "She wants you to have it. It's a working ring. It's not meant to look nice."

"Dilly."

"You don't have to say anything."

"I am going to say several things," said Sel, "and they are going to be inadequate, so I shall say only the one." His voice wasn't steady. He took the ring from her carefully, as if it were a live bird, and closed his hand on it. "I will not lose it."

"Good."

"I will not lose a single day of it."

That was not part of any contract. She noted it, the way she noted anything out of place, and put it away for later, and then the door of courtroom three opened and an usher in a brown suit said, "Karimova-Thornquist?" in a tone of tremendous doubt, and the thirty seconds of privacy were over.

The courtroom was full. Not the public benches only; the aisles, the window ledges, the gallery rail, all of it thick with white dresses and dark suits and phones, and in the front row on the left, where the groom's family would sit if a groom had family, sat Maurice Thornquist in a pale grey suit with a rosebud pinned to the lapel and a white paper bag in his lap.

He waved. It was a small, delighted wave, a man at a nephew's school play.

"Don't," Sel murmured at her ear. "He is trying to be looked at."

"I'm looking at the exits."

"Look at the judge. She is wonderful. She once fined a mayor for a pun."

The judge was a short broad woman called Okafor-Lindqvist, with silver braids and spectacles pushed up into her hair, and she married them in nine minutes. Dilly would try afterwards to recall it and find only pieces. The tin-whistle sound of the judge's voice. The scrape of two hundred chairs. Sel's hand, which was cold, and then warm, and then, by the time they reached the word forsaking, very still in hers. The band on his left wrist read 134 and she watched it fall to 122 on do you take, and 117 when she said I do.

She put her father's ring on his finger. It went on easily, a size too large. He turned his hand over and looked at it. In the front row Gulnora had one hand over her mouth, a thing Dilly had never in her life seen her do.

"By the authority invested in me by the state and the county," said the judge, "and the evident interest of the local press." There was a ripple of laughter. "I pronounce you married. Mr. Thornquist-Adeleke, you may kiss your bride, if she's agreeable. Mrs. Karimova-Thornquist, you may decline."

Dilly turned her head. His face was very near, grey eyes, dark lashes, the faint sweet sharpness of the pills on his breath. He did not move. He waited, which was the thing she had not expected: that a man with thirty days and a failing heart could stand in front of two hundred strangers and wait, politely, to be told yes.

She kissed his cheek, quickly, hard, at the corner of the jaw, as one stamps a document.

The room erupted. The ushers ran. Junie shrieked in a register that cracked glass, and somewhere above it all Rustam's voice rose, cracking, in a long, delighted, inarticulate howl for nine thousand people, and Sel, to her surprise, laughed, a real laugh, and said very low, "That is the most expensive cheek I have ever had."

"Don't get used to it."

"I would not dare."

* * *

The register was signed on the clerk's desk by the window. Dilly signed, then Sel, then the witnesses, Junie in a flourish of purple ink and Margit in a small upright hand, and for a moment the four of them stood around the desk with the afternoon light on the page, and it was only a form, only a county form on a clipboard. She breathed.

"Dilnoza." Maurice had come up behind her. He did it so quietly that she did not hear him over the din, and she disliked herself for it; she should have heard. He was holding out the paper bag. "Cardamom. Fresh from the oven. I know it's a silly thing, but they were your mother-in-law's favourites, I mean your husband's grandmother's, and I thought, well, why not."

"Thank you."

"And you've made an old man very happy. Truly." His eyes were wet. They were genuinely wet, the whites rimmed with red, his gap-toothed grin trembling at the edges. "I've been so afraid for that boy. You've no idea. And now he's got you."

"Uncle Maurice," said Sel, behind her. His voice was perfectly civil. "How kind."

"Not at all. Not at all." Maurice patted Sel's arm. "I did want to say, before I forget, that the Foundation's been thinking about tonight. About the Close. We don't want anyone saying afterwards that things were done in a corner. So the board has appointed an observer. Just for the first few weeks, until things settle. A neutral party."

Margit's pen stopped moving on the register.

"Who?" said Dilly.

"Oh, you know him. He's been in Lisbon for a wedding, but he cut it short for this, such a conscientious boy." Maurice beamed, and lifted a hand toward the back of the courtroom, where the white dresses parted. "Tobin! Come and say hello to the family."

A young man in a navy blazer and a blue Foundation lanyard stood by the door with a tablet under his arm. He was perhaps twenty-six, fair, neat, unremarkable, with a pale, ordinary mouth.