Thirty days to fall in love

Chapter One: "The Girl Who Priced Herself at One Dollar" POV: Ava Reese — First Person The man across the room is holding his wife's hand like it is the only thing keeping him on the earth. I notice this the way I notice everything in Chair Seven — from a slight distance, with the particular attention of someone who has learned that small things are the ones worth cataloguing. His knuckles are white. Her eyes are closed. The IV line runs from the bag above her to the crook of her arm, and he has arranged himself in the plastic visitor chair so that nothing interrupts the connection between his palm and hers. He is not looking at her face. He is looking at their joined hands, as if the looking itself is a form of prayer he invented. June appears at my elbow with a fresh saline flush and follows my gaze across the room. "That's Walter," she says, her voice low and her bright red lipstick somehow still intact at eleven in the morning. "He has not missed a single Tuesday in four months." I look back at my own hands resting open in my lap. Ink under the fingernails on my right hand. A faint tremor in the left that I have learned to hide by holding things. I am holding nothing. This is the morning I decide I am tired of holding nothing. June finishes adjusting my IV line, and the antiseptic smell of the clinic mixes with the lavender oil I keep in my coat pocket — a trick I read about somewhere in the first months, when I was still reading articles with titles like Ten Ways to Make Chemo More Bearable. I have stopped reading those articles. I have kept the lavender. Some compromises are worth making. "You have that look," June says, not looking at me, writing something on my chart. "I have many looks." "You have two looks, Ava. The one where you're fine and the one where you've decided something." She caps her pen and finally meets my eyes. "That's the second one." I do not answer her, which is its own kind of answer. Across the room, Walter shifts in his plastic chair and reaches up with his free hand to tuck a loose strand of hair behind his wife's ear. She doesn't wake. He does it so carefully, so deliberately, that I have to look away. There is an intimacy in that gesture that feels private in a way that a kiss never does. It is the intimacy of someone who has done that exact thing ten thousand times and will do it ten thousand more, or as many times as he is given. My phone buzzes against my thigh. I ignore it. It buzzes again. June raises an eyebrow. I pull it out. The message is from an unsaved number, but the text begins: This is Ross Park. I'm texting from the nurses' station because you won't answer my calls. There is a lawyer named Richard Hale who has contacted me four times this week asking for your number. He represents a Nathaniel Cole. He says it is a professional matter and— I lock the phone. For three weeks, I have been deleting variations of this message. The name Nathaniel Cole means nothing to me, but the words professional matter from a billionaire's lawyer have a specific smell, and that smell is desperation dressed in a suit. I do not have time for desperation dressed in suits. Except. I look back at Walter. At the white knuckles. At the careful hand. I unlock my phone. I read the rest of June's message: — he says it is confidential and time-sensitive and Ava, I know you will delete this, but please don't delete this. I look at the message for a long time. I do not delete it. The restaurant Nathaniel Cole has chosen for this meeting is the kind of place where the menu has no prices, which means the prices are high enough that printing them would be considered rude. I arrive two minutes late because the crosstown bus runs on its own theology and not on any schedule a person can plan around. I do not apologize for the two minutes. He is already seated. I know it is him before the hostess points because he is the only person in the room sitting with the stillness of someone accustomed to being waited for. Dark hair, grey eyes that move to me the moment I walk in, a charcoal suit with a collar so precise it looks like architecture. He does not stand when I approach, which tells me he considered standing and decided against it, which tells me he is managing this meeting the way he manages everything — as a transaction with a preferred outcome. I sit down. I do not take off my coat. He slides a document across the white tablecloth without greeting me first. "The terms are outlined on page one," he says. "The financial structure is on pages three through five. The exit clauses—" "I can read," I say. He stops. I read. It takes eleven minutes, which I know because there is a clock on the wall behind his left shoulder and I am aware of time the way sailors are aware of weather. Ten million dollars. One year. Twelve rules. Rule Four states that I will attend no fewer than three public events per month. Rule Seven states that all social media activity must be approved by his communications team. Rule Eleven states that the arrangement terminates cleanly, with no legal recourse available to either party post-contract. I turn the last page. I slide the document back across the table. "No," I say. Something moves behind his grey eyes. Not surprise, precisely. The recalibration of a man whose models have returned an unexpected result. "The compensation is—" "I don't want ten million dollars." I fold my hands on the table. "I want thirty days. One dollar. Three conditions." I watch him process this. "No questions about my Tuesdays. No pity, regardless of what you think you know or find out. And you hold my hand when I ask, without making it strange." The silence between us has a texture. I can feel him measuring me, looking for the angle, the leverage point, the thing I am actually after. He will not find it, because what I am actually after is not something a man like Nathaniel Cole has a category for. "That's it?" he says. "That's everything." He looks at me for a moment that is three seconds long and feels longer. Then he picks up his pen and signs his copy of the document I have just handed him — the one I had typed and printed at the library on my lunch break, the one with my three conditions where his twelve rules used to be. I take my copy. I stand. I button my coat. "I'll need your address," he says. I give it to him. I leave. The walk home takes twenty-two minutes. I spend nineteen of them feeling something I do not have a safe name for and three of them reminding myself why I chose thirty days and not thirty-one. At home, I open the drawer of my bedside table. My will is there, folded in thirds, the way my mother taught me to fold important things. I place the signed contract on top of it. The paper is warm from being held. I press my palm flat against it for one moment, the way Walter pressed his palm against his wife's hand in Chair Seven, as if the pressure itself could say what language cannot. Then I close the drawer. Then I go and make chamomile tea with hands that are, for the first time in months, completely still. I do not let myself wonder why. I already know why, and knowing it changes nothing, and that is the most honest thing I can tell you about the night I sold thirty days of my life for one dollar and felt, in some quiet chamber of myself I had almost forgotten, like I had finally made a good trade. My phone lights up on the counter. A text from June: Did you call him? I type back: Signed. Moving in Thursday. Her reply comes in four seconds: Ava. One word. She has packed everything she cannot say into one word, and I receive all of it, and I set my phone face-down, and I drink my tea, and outside the window the city continues its loud, indifferent life, and I sit inside it and feel, improbably, like I am exactly where I am supposed to be. I give myself that feeling for exactly one cup of tea. Then I open my journal and write the date at the top of a fresh page. Underneath it I write: Day Zero. Tomorrow it begins. Thirty days. No more, no less, and not one hour of it wasted on wishing it were different. I cap my pen. I do not write what comes after that thought, the part that lives below the resolve, the part that whispers that thirty days with someone who holds your hand might be enough to make the rest of it bearable. Some things do not need to be written to be true.