MARRIED TO MY ENEMIES SON

PROXIMITY

After the hospital, something shifted — not dramatically, not all at once, but the way a house settles after a long winter, small adjustments nobody notices until the door that used to stick suddenly swings free.

Marcus started leaving the office earlier. Not every night, but enough that Fallon began, against her own better judgment, to listen for his key in the lock. He never announced it as anything. He'd simply appear in the kitchen doorway while she cooked, lean against the frame with his tie already loosened, and ask what she was making in a tone that suggested he actually wanted to know, not just fill silence.

"You don't have to hover," she told him one night, three weeks after the hospital, stirring a pot of her mother's arroz caldo recipe, the one that only tasted right if you didn't measure the ginger.

"I'm not hovering. I'm supervising." He nodded at the pot. "That smells like it might actually be good, which is new information about this kitchen."

"Careful, Marcus. Compliments aren't in the contract."

"Neither is caring whether your brother lives or dies, and yet." He said it lightly, but something in his face flickered when he heard himself say it out loud — like he'd surprised himself with the honesty and wasn't sure whether to take it back.

She let the silence stretch instead of filling it, testing whether he'd retreat behind the careful, contractual version of himself. He didn't.

"Sit," she said instead, nodding at the stool across the counter. "Since you're supervising."

He sat. And for the first time in five months of marriage, they ate dinner together at the counter instead of at opposite ends of a table built for people who didn't want to look at each other, and the conversation didn't once touch on lawyers, or press appearances, or the careful choreography of their arrangement. He told her, unprompted, about the summer he'd spent at fourteen trying to teach himself guitar because his father was never home to notice either way. She told him about the year her father taught her to argue a contract clause by clause at the dinner table, back before Lindqvist Holdings became a word that made her stomach turn.

She watched him carefully when she said the name. He didn't flinch. But something behind his eyes went very still, the particular stillness of a man holding a door shut with his whole body weight.

---

The undoing — or the beginning of it — happened on a Thursday in his office, when she came by to sign paperwork for a charity gala neither of them wanted to attend and found the door to his private study ajar.

She wasn't looking for anything. That mattered later, though it didn't change what she saw: a manila folder on the corner of his desk, half out of a drawer he'd clearly meant to lock, her father's name typed across the tab in block letters. REYES — INTERNAL.

Her hand was on it before her better judgment caught up with her.

"Fallon."

Marcus's voice from the doorway was low, controlled in the way she'd learned meant he was working very hard not to sound alarmed.

"What is this," she said, not a question, her thumb still holding the folder closed, unopened, because some instinct told her that whatever was inside would not be undoable once she'd read it.

He crossed the room and, gently, took it from her hands — not a grab, not a struggle, just a quiet removal, the way you'd take a lit match from a child. "It's not what you're building it into in your head."

"Then tell me what it is."

For a long moment he said nothing, and she watched him do the same thing he'd done on the porch six months ago — run the calculation, weigh what telling her would cost against what not telling her already had. Except this time the porch version of Marcus, all cool arithmetic and clean edges, seemed to lose the argument to someone messier.

"Not tonight," he said finally, and his voice had none of its usual iron in it. "Not because I don't trust you. Because if I tell you now, in this room, with you already half-convinced I'm my father — you won't hear it the way it needs to be heard. Give me time to do this right, and I will tell you everything. I promise you that."

"You don't get to promise me things and then lock them in a drawer, Marcus."

"I know." He set the folder down, and for once he didn't retreat behind the doorway version of himself — the composed, unreadable man who'd knocked on her porch with an offer instead of an apology. He reached out, slow enough that she could step back if she wanted to, and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear like it was something he'd been wanting to do for weeks and had finally run out of reasons not to. "I know exactly what I'm asking of you. I'm asking anyway. Because somewhere in the last five months this stopped being a contract to me, and I don't know how to tell you that without also telling you the rest of it, and the rest of it might be the thing that makes you leave."

Her breath caught somewhere between her ribs and her throat. "Marcus—"

"Don't," he said quietly. "Not yet. Let me earn the right to say it properly first."

He left the folder locked in the drawer that night. But he didn't let go of her hand until she pulled it back herself, and long after he'd gone, Fallon stood in the doorway of his study with her pulse still uneven, terrified that she was starting to want things from Marcus Lindqvist that had nothing to do with rice and rent money and everything to do with the way he'd looked at her like she was the one thing in his carefully arranged life he hadn't planned for and didn't regret.