Wrong sister, Right man

chapter 4

I turned twenty-seven on Saturday, and nobody threw me a party.

I want to be fair to the universe here. It did try. My aunt Grace sent a voicemail that was mostly her breathing and the sound of a dog, which is her version of a card. My friend Dolly from the planning office sent a photo of a cupcake with a candle she'd clearly lit in a break room. And at four in the afternoon, I stood alone in my kitchen eating a slice of grocery-store cake straight off the plastic tray, with the fork in my left hand because my right was holding my phone, which kept refusing to show me the one message I was stupid enough to be waiting for.

I'd deleted Ryan's number on Thursday night. I knew that. My thumb kept going to the place where it used to be anyway.

On Sunday, my father came to my apartment. He never comes to my apartment. He stood in the doorway holding a thick stack of paper held together with a binder clip, and for a second I thought he was going to hand me a legal notice.

"I read it," he said.

It was my proposal. All forty pages, soft at the corners, every margin crowded with his tiny engineer's handwriting. He'd underlined things. He'd put little question marks next to the numbers he didn't trust and little ticks next to the ones he did. On the first page, in blue ink, he'd written one line across the top: *Page 12 is brilliant. Page 31 is wrong. Happy birthday. Dad.*

"Page 31 is not wrong," I said.

"Page 31 is a little wrong."

"It's slightly wrong."

"Come and I'll show you," he said, and he came in, and we sat at my kitchen table for three hours, arguing about the cost of dye-house retrofitting like two people who had both been waiting a long time to be allowed to. He drank two cups of terrible tea. At one point he laughed at something I said, a real laugh, and I realized I hadn't heard it in about a year.

It didn't fix anything. I want to be clear about that. When he stood to go, he put his hand on my shoulder, awkwardly, the way you pat a horse you're not sure about, and he said, "You don't have to do this, Mia." And we both knew it was a sentence he'd said to make himself feel better, because we both knew what the alternative looked like.

"I know," I said.

Monday morning, I put the navy blazer back on.

---

This time, Ms. Adler didn't tell me he was running behind. She walked me straight to a conference room on the thirty-eighth floor, and Damian Blackwood was already sitting at the head of the table with two lawyers I hadn't been introduced to and a copy of my proposal in front of him.

My proposal. Forty pages, flagged with colored tabs in an order I could only call terrifying.

"Ms. Carter." He didn't stand. "Sit."

I sat. Not because he'd said so, I told myself, but because the chair was there.

"I've read it," he said.

"Everyone's been reading it. It's become a very popular document."

One of the lawyers coughed into his hand. Damian didn't smile. I'm not sure I'd have recognized it if he had.

"Page 31 is wrong," he said.

I stared at him. "Is it?"

"Your projection for the dye-house conversion assumes the old effluent permits transfer. They don't. You'll have to reapply, which adds roughly four months and a hundred and ten thousand to the costs." He turned a page, still not looking at me. "Everything else is competent. Page 12 is good."

"Page 12 is brilliant," I said, before I could stop myself.

"Page 12 is good," he repeated, and it took me an embarrassing second to realize that *good* had been the sound of a man being, for him, generous.

I wasn't sure whether to be furious or flattered, so I settled for both and sat there feeling like a rope being pulled in two directions.

"I'm told," he said, "that you have conditions."

"I do."

"Let's hear them."

I'd practiced this in the car, and in the elevator, and, if I'm being honest, in the shower that morning, in a voice that kept coming out higher than I wanted. I took a breath and kept my hands flat on the table so he wouldn't see them.

"One. The retool is mine. I run it, start to finish, with full authority. Not a consultant. Not a committee. Me, in writing."

"Agreed. I said so on Friday."

"Two. The marriage is a business arrangement and we both treat it like one. Separate rooms. No pretending."

"In private, agreed. In public, you'll have to pretend."

"I can pretend."

"Can you?"

"I practiced my surprise face for three days last week," I said. "I'm very good."

He looked at me properly for the first time, one beat longer than necessary, and I couldn't read it at all. His face was like a shut door. "Continue."

"Three." And here my voice did something it shouldn't. I steadied it. "Neither of us asks the other about our past. Not who, not why, not what happened. None of it."

I hadn't planned to say that one. It had been sitting under all the others, like a rock under a rug, and it came out before I could smooth it over.

I expected him to argue. Instead he went very still, and something crossed his face so briefly I might have invented it. If I'd had to name it, I'd have said relief.

"Agreed," he said.

"That's it? You're not going to ask why?"

"That would violate your condition."

I almost laughed. He was right, and it made me furious, and I wondered if this was what the next two years were going to feel like.

"My terms," he said, and one of the lawyers slid a thick document across the table. "Term of the marriage is two years, to match the retool schedule. You'll live in my house. You'll attend events as my wife and appear at them on time. No scandals, no relationships, no press interviews without clearance. And you'll send my assistant your calendar each week."

"My calendar."

"So I know where you are."

"I'm a grown woman."

"You're about to be a Blackwood. Where you are becomes my problem."

I should've objected. I did, a little, in the way you push at a door you already know is locked. He answered every point in the same flat tone, as though he were reading me a train timetable, and somewhere around the fourth objection I understood something unpleasant. He wasn't being cruel. He'd just never learned how to ask for something without sounding like he was giving an order.

That was a thought I put away at once, because it was dangerous.

I picked up the contract and went through it clause by clause with a pen from my bag. It was fourteen pages long, and by page nine I'd found three things I'd have fought a younger Mia over. By page twelve I'd stopped being afraid of him, which was a mistake, and I was just angry, which was better.

On page thirteen there was a clause that said *Mrs. Blackwood shall refrain from contradicting Mr. Blackwood in public or before third parties.*

I read it twice. Then I drew a neat black line through it.

"That's not a legal edit," said one of the lawyers faintly.

"It's a pen," I said.

Damian looked at the line. Then at me. Then back at the line. I braced for something. Instead he held out his hand for the pen, took it, and wrote his initials in the margin next to my strike-through. *D.B.* Small, square, a little cramped.

"Anything else?" he asked.

"On the last page." I turned to it, and wrote, under the signature block, in my own handwriting:

*Clause 15. Neither party shall ask the other about their past. M.C.*

He read it. He didn't hesitate this time. He initialed that one too.

Then I signed. My name looked thinner on that page than it ever had, and I wondered for one dizzy moment whose signature it was. It was a signature that belonged to someone who knew exactly what she was getting into. I wasn't that person. I was only pretending to be, which, I supposed, was the whole point.

"The wedding is in two weeks," he said, standing. "Small. Family, a few board members, one photographer. Ms. Adler will arrange everything."

"Two weeks."

"The bank gave your father sixty days. I'd rather not use all of them."

At the door, I stopped. I don't know what made me. Some small tug, the way you check your pocket for keys you already know are there.

"Mr. Blackwood."

"Damian." He was looking at the window, not at me. "You'll be using it in public. You may as well practice."

"Damian." It felt like putting on someone else's coat. "The woman who was here on Friday. Celeste."

His whole body changed, so slightly that I might not have noticed if I hadn't been looking. His jaw. His shoulders. The hand resting on the back of the chair.

"Clause fifteen," he said quietly.

My own handwriting, the ink still wet. I'd written the rule myself, and in the very same hour I'd walked straight into it.

"Right," I said. "Sorry."

"Don't be." He still hadn't turned around. "It's a good clause."

I went out into the hallway feeling stupid and strangely shaken, like I'd opened a door I'd just locked and found a draft coming through. Ms. Adler was waiting by the elevator with a tablet and an expression she must have been trained out of having.

"He'll send a car for you on Saturday," she said. "You'll want to see the house."

"Thank you."

She hesitated. It was a very small hesitation, and I might have missed it if I hadn't spent the last four days learning how many things people say with their pauses.

"Miss Carter," she said. "For what it's worth. I've worked for Mr. Blackwood six years."

"Yes?"

"He's never once initialed a clause he wasn't going to keep."

The elevator doors opened. I stepped inside, and she didn't say anything else, and the doors slid shut on her, and I stood in the mirrored box with my own face looking back at me. The calm face. The professional one.

I'd signed away two years of my life to a man I didn't trust, and I'd written the one clause that made it impossible for me to ever find out why I shouldn't.

I was still thinking about that when the doors opened on the lobby.