Jaume's visitor appears after a week of travel, in response to the letter he sent asking for her.  She introduces herself as Esperança.  It's one of those names that loudly and obviously used to be Asmodia (or something obscurer in the same vein; he met a Belia once).  You don't go around naming children "hope" under the yoke of Hell.  She acknowledges without any flinch that, yes, she's definitely the person identified on the debt paperwork as Asmodia, but perhaps he would like to update it with her new moniker.  It's after her grandmother, who was born during the civil war, she says.

He puts her up in an inn, one of the new hastily-converted places there to take advantage of the recentering of the nation's business in Westcrown - he doesn't even know if he likes her enough to sit through dinner with her yet, he's not putting her in the rectory.  Especially not since Chimo left.  It's less tidy in Jaume's rooms, without him.

They have dinner together.  They talk about what it would be like if they were to get married.  She wants a minimum allowance, and a percentage of his income for personal use, and a percentage for household budget.  They spend the soup course talking about what would make sense as a defaulting penalty on the first of those, if he were to suffer some kind of interruption in his ability to earn money that went on long enough to eat his savings and render him a bad loan candidate.  It's unlikely, but one just doesn't make commitments to pay a certain amount indefinitely without any specifications whatever for what happens if one fails in this responsibility.

He does like her, but he keeps thinking that someone might be reasonable and live up to what feel like very basic standards on a first meeting and then discovering that they're deficient in some important fashion.  He's begun to think in terms of whether people have disappointed him yet, unless they're also Abadar's handpicked, and even then he's only tentatively optimistic.

Still, by the end of her first week in Westcrown, Esperança hasn't disappointed him yet.  She's intrigued by the fact that he's in with the conservative faction at the convention, getting invited to noble dinners and planning sessions; she has more social acumen than he can boast and wants breakdowns of who said what, who was looking in what direction - do people not just look in directions because they want to see the things that are in those directions? - whether anyone was late, who's bringing their wives and children, whether the votes they discuss in advance are unanimous among the faction later on in committee or if they're being tripped up by unseen obstacles.

The inn is irksomely expensive.  It would be cheaper to marry her and move her in with him.  (It would be cheaper to not marry her and move her in with him, too, but disreputable, at least among the sort of people Jaume cares about impressing.)  She wants to know if they'll have a house, and he says he will get a house when there are going to be children, but probably not in Westcrown.  He might go back to Corentyn.  But he's considering also going to Cerdanya.  The Conde hasn't disappointed him, yet.  Most of the Longmarch is run by installed Osirians selected by the Archduke, Inquisitor Shawil, but Cerdanya in particular is not, a little pocket of unbanked Longmarch with a sensible Heaven-returned lord and, presumably, plenty of houses for sale that would be fine to raise children in.

She wants to know, when she hears about his project to ascend to Lawful Neutral, what his budget for it is, and he tries to verbalize the disquiet he feels about buying something not so that he will have that thing, but so that a third party will react to his purchase.  There's something so weird about the idea.  He's working on finding qualifying things to buy that he would actually like to have enough to spend money on them.  The conscientious objection provision, which he does actually want to have, will probably make it through to the Constitution, albeit in a weak form that won't be fully implemented until a new generation has a chance to interpret it (it took a few hits on its journey from backroom whispers to the floor).  She asks if it also feels weird to assign his wife (his hypothetical, future wife) a task and give her money to do it with, and he says it does not, and she says she can handle charitable donations for the household, if and when.

The Abadarans don't do weddings, really.  They do in Osirion - Cicerone Hikmat says so - but that's because in Osirion they're the state church, they do practically everything.  In Cheliax these days the choices for weddings are Shelyn or Erastil or making something up and crossing your fingers, most particularly since civil courts are still down.  (Probably the Sarenrites also do weddings, when they're the state church.)  The legal definition of marriage is a battleground anyway.  Jaume collects information on which way the wind is blowing on that, and in his spare time draws up an agreement that will clear all the minimum definitions, and since Hikmat does know the way Abadarans do weddings he asks her to do this one.  (He looked for Conde Fazil but he was back home fighting the gigas clams.)  He has nothing in particular against Shelyn or Erastil, they're just total strangers who don't look like they'd especially get along with Jaume, whereas Abadar is his closest friend, who saved him from a fate worse than death.

Jaume invites his parents; he invites his sister and her husband; they're not close but if they're going to see each other one time in the next thirty years this would be the time.  He invites all the least disappointing convention delegates he's worked with.  (They mostly don't show up, though the Conde Cerdanya sends a lovely gift.  It's money.)  They can't do the full Osirian vows - for one thing, promises of obedience are currently a hot topic - so instead they just read out abbreviated forms of their respective halves of what Jaume's written up, at Cicerone Hikmat's prompting, and they have a nice dinner where everyone is served a completely normal and finishable amount of food, and he moves Esperança into the rectory and they figure that out.  The place looks a lot tidier after she's lived there for a couple of days.

When the convention's wrapping up he asks Conde Cerdanya if there's a bank in Cerdanya yet, and if there isn't, where he'd like one, and they depart together.  Jaume and Esperança get a house just a block away from the repurposed temple where Jaume establishes a branch of the Bank of Abadar, complete with renovations that will leave it defensible even if he might stop channeling negative at any time.

Esperança disburses a charity budget on top of the household budget and her personal allowance.  Jaume finds that he doesn't especially mind not handling the domestic finances.  He would have expected to - all those purchases being made on his behalf without his attention! - but Chimo used to do the shopping sometimes and that was fine, and Esperança doing it is also fine, she's not going to do something ridiculous, she's sensible or he wouldn't have married her.  He handles plenty of money at work.

Every morning Jaume prays - for spells, for fortune, for the healing powers he's trying to work towards.  He has breakfast - Esperança makes good biscuits - and walks to work, and he does boring reliable banking for the people of his lord's county, and he comes home for his lunch break (noodles, usually) and again after the close of the bank, for dinner (the local habit is soup and a roast, every night if you can afford that or Sundays if you're frugal).

And one morning, around when Esperança's started having trouble keeping her biscuits down with the forthcoming baby, Jaume's prayers are answered.

He walks to the church.  It's not just a bank, it's also a church.  And he updates the channeling schedule chalked on the wall.