( new york city | 1995 | you have always said that i was myself a chinese puzzle box )
The first thing Daphne says when Cal finds her in his office with her high heels on his desk - and without an appointment, she heard his secretary apologizing while he was on his way in - is simple: "So, annulment. How does that work?"
Merriam-Webster tells her that it is the act of annulling and the state of being annulled. It tells her that it is a judicial or ecclesiastical ruling declaring a marriage invalid. (Null and void; as if it never happened.) She learns that its first use was in the fifteenth century, and finds an example of usage declaring an annulment of that hastily conceived marriage can't come too soon. Words like voiding, rescinding, and invalidation are all related terms that echo in her ears and the sound of the office door swinging shut behind him is too loud, it stills her fingers tapping against the edge of his desk and she stands, crossing the room to lean against the windowsill (tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap).
The rest of the conversation - "On what grounds?" "'Deception'." "I can actually hear the punctuation in your voice, did you know that?" - registers like a low buzz in her ears, like something happening to someone else, when it's 2:45AM and there's a movie playing in the background while she can't sleep, black and white with patchy reception and it drives her crazy, like she didn't just spend half an hour pissing around with that goddamn aerial-
"Does it matter what the deception was? Exactly? Are they going to ask me that in court? What I mean is, can I technically be pleading irreconcilable differences...?"
"That's not a plea, for the record, but-"
"Well, I'm not guilty, Cal-"
"I know that, Daphne. This would be a lot easier if you would sit down."
("You're not going to tell anyone, are you?"
He pauses, his hand in the door frame, the back of his shoulders a tense line, and she can't hear a damn thing over that silence.)