The third party assessment required by Vantage Meridian’s settlement terms was scheduled for the fifteenth day of November, which gave us thirty days from the San Francisco meeting to exist as a real marriage in front of an assessor who would then write a report that would determine whether the debt was cleared and the inheritance released.
Thirty days to be real.
The irony was that thirty days was the least of our concerns. We had become, without a formal agreement or a deliberate decision, something that looked considerably more real than either of us had planned.
We had breakfast together every morning. This had begun during the days following the Marsh and Osei publications, when the shared adrenaline of managing the situation had kept us at the kitchen table longer than necessity r
