Chapter 3
1376 Words
The guard's name was Ray.
I figured that out because someone in the hallway said it through the open door "Ray, stay on the door" and Ray straightened up like a soldier and said "yes sir" and that was that. Ray. Big shoulders, neutral face, radio on his belt. He stood by the door and looked at the wall and pretended I wasn't sitting three feet away trying to piece together how I was alive.
I had nothing to do but think.
So I thought.
The memories came the way dreams come back to you in the morning — in fragments, out of order, some of them vivid and some of them already dissolving at the edges before I could get a proper look.
A dining room. Round table. White walls. A man across from me, her father, Aria's father — with his hands flat on the table and his eyes on the tablecloth and his voice doing that particular thing voices do when someone is asking for something they know they don't deserve.
"It's a good arrangement, Aria. A clean arrangement. The Harrington family is—"
"I don't care who they are."
"Their name alone will—"
"Paaa, Stop."
But he hadn't stopped. That was the thing about Aria's father — he had a way of talking that kept going even when the words ran out, filling silence with justification, with reframing, with the particular cruelty of a man who believed that loving someone and selling them could exist in the same sentence.
I sat with that memory for a moment.
Then I reached for the next one.
********
An office. Cooler than the dining room. Two men in suits and a document on the desk between them, several pages thick, the Harrington name printed at the top in clean black font. Aria had sat in that chair and read every line. She was thorough — I could feel that about her even through borrowed memory. She was careful. She read things twice.
Contract of Arrangement.
Duration: One hundred and fifty days.
Parties: Harrington Industries LLC and the Chen family.
Terms of the arrangement include but are not limited to: public representation as spouse, attendance at all required social and corporate functions, conduct befitting the Harrington name.
I pulled back from that one. It was too much, too fast, like trying to drink from something that was pouring too quickly.
Okay.
Okay, so.
A contract. A marriage in name. One hundred and fifty days. The Harrington family had needed something — a clause met, an inheritance unlocked, a public arrangement for reasons that lived somewhere deeper in those pages — and Aria Chen's father had given them his daughter to meet it.
And then Aria had ended up in a chair with zip-tied wrists.
Which meant somewhere between signing that contract and right now, something had gone wrong enough that they felt the need to restrain her.
Or.
I looked at the zip tie.
Or she had tried to leave.
I tested the binding quietly. Not obviously — I kept my posture still and my face neutral and just pressed my wrists apart slowly to feel how much give there was.
None.
Whoever tied this knew what they were doing.
"You're not going to get that off," Ray said from the door.
I looked up. He was still looking at the wall.
"I wasn't trying to," I said.
"You were."
A pause.
"How long have I been here?" I asked.
Ray was quiet for a second. Like he was deciding what counted as classified. "Few hours."
"Since when?"
"Since they brought you in."
"That's not an answer."
"No," he agreed. "It's not."
I looked at him properly then. He had one of those faces that had probably been young recently but had moved past it faster than expected. Late twenties maybe. The kind of eyes that had seen enough to stop being surprised by things.
"Ray," I said.
A flicker. He glanced at me sideways. "You heard that."
"I hear most things." I kept my voice even. "Ray, can I have the water?"
He looked at the glass on the table. Looked at my bound wrists. Did the small mental calculation of whether this was a security risk or just a person who was thirsty.
He crossed the room, picked up the glass, and held it for me while I drank.
It was the most dignity anyone in this building had shown me so far, which wasn't saying much, but I noted it anyway.
"Thank you," I said.
He put the glass back. Returned to the door. "Don't mention it."
I went back to the memories.
The Harrington penthouse.
I knew this building. Aria knew it — had been shown photographs, floor plans, a virtual walkthrough that one of the lawyers had arranged before everything went sideways. Central Park West. Thirty-eighth floor and above. Three levels. The lower level was staff quarters and formal rooms — the kind of rooms that exist to be seen rather than lived in. The middle level was private offices. The upper level was—
The upper level was his.
Dale's.
His bedroom, his study, the terrace that wrapped around the top like — like a crown, some part of me thought, and I shut that down fast because that was Elena's memory bleeding into Aria's and I could not afford to get them tangled.
Stay focused.
From the angle of the ceiling and the quality of the carpet and the elevator ride I couldn't remember but Aria could — we were on the lower level. A room off the main corridor, not far from the staff quarters. Not a guest room exactly. Something in between. Something that said you're here but you're not staying.
You're here but we haven't decided what you are yet.
I thought about the contract again.
One hundred and fifty days.
Contract wife. Public appearances. Conduct befitting the Harrington name. I tried to find the clause about what happened at the end — the settlement, the release — but that part of the memory was blurry. Either Aria had skimmed it or she had read it and something about it had made her stop storing the details properly.
That scared me a little.
What do you read that you don't want to remember?
"Ray."
He sighed. Quiet, almost amused. "What."
"What's today's date?"
"Why?"
"Because I'd like to know."
"Why?"
I looked at him. "Because I was unconscious for an unknown amount of time in a room I didn't arrive in consciously and I would like to have some basic orientation to my circumstances. Is that a reasonable thing to want?"
A beat.
"May fifteenth," he said.
I did the math against Aria's memory of the contract signing. Three days. I had been — she had been — wherever they'd kept her before this, for three days, and now she was here, and now I was here, and the contract presumably started counting from today or from whenever Dale Harrington decided it officially began.
One hundred and fifty days.
I was going to need every single one of them.
I heard him before I saw him.
Not footsteps — the carpet was too thick for that. Not a voice. Just a shift in the air outside the door, the way pressure changes when someone large and deliberate moves through a space. And then —
Cologne.
Clean and dark and expensive and so achingly, terrifyingly familiar that my whole body went rigid before my brain caught up.
I knew that smell.
I knew it from a school hallway on a Tuesday morning when he'd sat next to me in the library and argued about Fitzgerald for forty-five minutes and I'd walked home afterward unable to stop smiling. I knew it from the back of his car and from borrowed hoodies and from one specific night in late February when it had snowed and we'd stood on the roof of my building in Queens looking at the whitened city and he'd stood behind me with his arms around me and his chin on my head and I'd thought —
I'd thought: this is mine. This person is mine.
The door opened.
And there he was.
- Writer
