Two Years to Forever

CHAPTER FOUR

The dream always started the same way: the hospital corridor, the particular green of the walls, his father's hand too tight around his shoulder, like letting go might make it more real. There was always a clock somewhere in the dream too, though he could never later remember what it showed, only that its ticking had seemed unbearably loud, louder than anything else in the whole corridor, loud enough that some nights he woke certain he could still hear it in the silence of his own bedroom.

He was twenty-nine again. His mother's room was at the end of the corridor, and the corridor never got shorter no matter how fast he walked, and somewhere behind the door a machine was making a sound that wasn't a heartbeat anymore, hadn't been for longer than anyone had told him yet. He had been drinking that night when it happened. If only he had been responsible enough.

He watched as they took her body into the morgue and he screamed out, “Mom!!!”He woke screaming and gasping, drenched, his heart going too hard against his ribs before his own bedroom dissolved around him in the dark.

Three in the morning, three years since the corridor had been real, and it still found him at least once a week, still put him back at a door he couldn't open fast enough. Nobody knew, exactly, how his mother had died. Publicly, an illness, sudden and merciful in how quickly it had been over. Privately, John had never fully believed that was the case. She was very healthy. Something was at play, and his Dad didn't give it much thought. There was a truth still on the other side of it that needed to be uncovered.

Some questions cost more than they're worth, and he had learned, eventually, to file the whole thing somewhere he didn't have to look at it in daylight.

His phone was ringing.

"Reed," he answered, rougher than he meant to.

"I have terms," Isabel said, no idea what she'd interrupted.

He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye, grounding himself in the ordinary shape of her voice. "I'm listening."

"Separate rooms. My name doesn't go on anything of yours beyond what the contract requires." She paused, steadying herself. "And whatever I build while I'm married to you, any business, anything I start using your name or connections, stays entirely mine when it's over. Not the Reed name's. Mine."

"Agreed. Anything else."

"Five million pounds instead of two. When the two years are up, we walk away cleanly, and you don't get to act afterward like it meant something it didn't."

Something tightened in his chest at that, like she was warning a version of him from eight years ago. "Agreed. My lawyer will have the contract drafted by the end of the week."

"Fine."

"Isabel." A pause on the line. "Thank you."

She ended the call without another word.

The engagement announcement went out nine days later. His uncle's congratulations arrived within the hour, warm enough on the surface that only someone who knew Peter well would catch the current underneath: I don't believe a word of this, and I intend to prove it.

Isabel's mother found out the same way the rest of the country did, secondhand, from a stranger's phone at a friend's house, and Isabel called him sounding more shaken than she had on any call about the contract itself.

Angela found out from the announcement like everyone else, which he supposed was its own kind of message, one he hadn't consciously intended to send but found he didn't particularly regret sending anyway. She showed up at his office two days later, dressed as if she'd come from somewhere important and wanted the room to know it.

"Isabel Conner. Really, John."

"Really."

"You hated her. You told me yourself, back when we were—"

"I don't remember saying that." He remembered. He remembered a lot of things he'd said since Isabel, most designed to convince himself as much as whoever was listening.

"This is about the will."

"This is about my father's company staying out of my uncle's hands after everything he built it from nothing. Think what you like about the rest of it, Angela."

She left without another word, heels sharp against the floor, and he found, to his own surprise, that he didn't particularly care.

The wedding was six days away. His uncle's calls to mutual acquaintances had already started, casual questions dressed up as pleasantries, digging for the crack he was so certain existed. And John still hadn't told a single living person, Isabel included, what had actually woken him at three that morning, or why some nights the distance between twenty-nine years old and thirty-two felt like no distance at all.

He told himself it didn't matter. He had a wedding to get through, and a contract to honor, and two years to survive before any of the rest of it had to matter to anyone but him.

He almost believed it.