Chapter Text
Dreams can be silly, childish; with real unicorns taking you to a kingdom far, far away, where cotton candy grows on trees and hot chocolate pours from the tap; it can be a desire for your own room, without annoying noise from your younger sister, who asks you to play hide-and-seek with her when you think it's for “babies only”.
And there are real dreams, those for which you pray into your pillow at night, not to any particular God, but as if to yourself. Graduating from college, which, although it has been a dream since high school, is still incredibly difficult. Don't embarrass your parents, especially your father, who is so strict and authoritarian that even your mother bows her head and starts to polish the dishes until they shine.
Dreams come in different forms. And Lina had them all. But now, sitting in her father's car and driving along the forest road, she couldn't remember wishing for anything more than to wake up and discover that everything that had happened over the past month was a dream. That she would close her eyes and open them in her dorm room. That all this nightmare wouldn't happen.
But Lina's dreams are all the past now.
"Get out." Father muttered, stopping the car and getting out of the driver's seat.
The church was a small, lonely building in a grassy field. As Lina got out of the car, she noticed another truck parked next to her father's car. It was bigger, and clearly belonged to someone who was used to driving on the outskirts of the city. Someone who was standing inside the church and waiting for her.
She followed her father, clasping her hands in her lower abdomen and lowering her head, either squinting at the sun, which was too bright for an October day, or trying to hide from the outside world with a curtain of her red hair. She wasn't wearing the little makeup she liked to put on every time she left the house. But she was wearing a white dress.
Bride. That's who she was. No longer a twenty-year-old college student, but the future wife of a man who was standing next to a priest and talking to him about something.
The door slammed behind her, and the men turned to look at her. Lina wasn't interested in the priest, who was trying to smooth out the atmosphere with an awkward but wide smile, no. She is interested in a tall man in faded jeans and a white shirt.
He was taller than her father, and taller than her by a full head. His ashy blond hair was cropped short at the temples and awkwardly pulled back, as if it had just been combed by hand. He looked at Lina with his brown eyes, focusing on her face rather than what was below.
He knew that. Her father found a man, a farmer, who was willing to marry her and then accept her child, conceived out of wedlock. The man was older than her, Lina noticed that. How old was he? Twenty-eight?
"Riley." The silence was interrupted by her father, holding out his hand to the man.
"Bennett." He held out his palm, and men shook hands.
It looked like a deal. It was as if they had concluded a contract and signed it with a handshake, like investors or a buyer and seller. And the product… The product was the reputation of Lina's family.
That will now, after a quick ceremony in the church, be saved.
And Lina herself… She'll get married. To the man she saw for the first time.