The Marriage Clause

Chapter 10

Zoe’s POV

The day of the dinner with Marcel, Zoe’s nerves were a live wire beneath her skin. It wasn’t the formality that scared her; it was the intimacy. A family dinner promised a different kind of scrutiny, one that looked for shared jokes, familiar touches, the quiet rhythm of a real relationship.

She dressed with care, choosing a simple dress in a deep forest green that felt more authentically her than the loaned navy gown. It was soft, unadorned, and it didn’t feel like a costume.

Will was quiet during the car ride to Marcel’s brownstone. The silence wasn’t hostile, but it was thick with unspoken preparation. “He likes you,” Will said suddenly, watching the city lights streak past the window. “That’s the only reason he’s invited us alone. So just… be yourself.”

Zoe glanced at him, his profile sharp in the intermittent glow. “Which one?” she asked, the words slipping out before she could stop them.

He turned his head, his gaze meeting hers in the dim interior. “The one who isn’t afraid to tell the hard truth about a sculpture,” he said, his voice low. “That’s the one he wants to meet.”

Marcel’s home was a revelation. After the stark, cinematic spaces Will inhabited, the brownstone was a warm, breathing hug of a place. Books overflowed from shelves and stacked in towers on side tables. The art on the walls was diverse a small, intense landscape next to a bold abstract piece, all chosen clearly for love, not investment. The air smelled wonderfully of rosemary, roasting meat, and old paper.

Marcel greeted them at the door, pulling Will into a firm, back slapping hug before taking both of Zoe’s hands in his own. His palms were warm and slightly rough. “Come in, come in! The rule tonight is simple: no business talk. We are here for food, for wine, and for stories. The good kind.”

The dinner was, against all odds, easy. Marcel was a masterful raconteur, spinning tales of a young, painfully serious Will trying to use graph paper to engineer the “optimal” treehouse, and getting frustrated when the actual trees didn’t conform to his plan. Will actually laughed, a real, unguarded sound that softened the lines of his face and made him look years younger. Zoe found herself laughing too, drawn into the circle of warm light and family history.

“And you, Zoe,” Marcel said, passing her a heavy bowl of buttery mashed potatoes. “William tells me you’re a writer. A wordsmith. What do you love to write? When it’s just for you?”

It was the question she always dreaded, the one that probed past the ghostwriting and into the dreams she kept locked away. She took a careful sip of water. “I… help other people find the shape of their stories,” she said, sticking to the safe, edited version of the truth.

“A ghost!” Marcel’s eyes sparkled with delight, not judgment. “How fascinating. The most powerful voice in the room, and the one no one hears by name. And what story are you and my grandson writing together?”

The question, though kindly asked, was a spotlight swung directly onto the stage of their lie. Zoe froze, her fork hovering mid-air. The fiction of their meeting, their shared interests—it all felt flimsy and pathetic under the weight of Marcel’s genuine curiosity.

Then, she felt it. Will’s hand, warm and solid, covering hers where it rested on the table. It was a practiced move, a standard part of their “couple” repertoire. But here, in this real home, with his grandfather’s kind eyes watching, the touch felt different. It felt like an anchor, a silent signal that he was in this with her.

“A slow burn, Grandfather,” Will said smoothly, his thumb making a single, faint pass over her knuckle. “We’re still in the early chapters. The best ones take time to develop, don’t they?”

Marcel laughed, a rich, full-bodied sound. “They do indeed! The ones that last always do. Good answer.”

Later, as Marcel showed Zoe his small, cluttered study, pointing out a tiny, exquisite maritime painting he’d found in Lisbon, her eyes wandered. She loved this room, its lived-in chaos. As she admired a small framed sketch on his desk, her gaze dropped to the lower shelves of a crowded bookcase. And there, tucked between a tome on Renaissance techniques and a biography of a modern sculptor, was a long, slender wooden box. The lid was slightly ajar.

Inside, she could see the vibrant ends of artist’s pastel chalks. Not the cheap, dusty kind, but the professional, high-pigment sort used by serious artists. And one of them, lying separate from the others, was a specific, vivid shade of cobalt blue.

Her breath caught in her throat, a silent, choking thing. The color was unmistakable. It was the exact shade of the faint, powdery smudge she had seen on the immaculate white floor of Will’s penthouse on her very first day.

Her mind raced, a frantic collision of facts. Marcel was an art lover, a collector. It made perfect sense he would own such materials. But the coincidence was jarring, a discordant note in the evening’s harmony. That particular blue, in that particular quality…

“That box is from my hopeful phase,” Marcel said, noticing her fixed gaze. He chuckled. “I thought maybe, in my retirement, I’d try my hand at drawing. Discovered I had the soul of a patron, not a creator. No talent for the making, only a deep love for the made.” He looked at her keenly. “Do you draw, Zoe?”

“No,” she said, forcing her voice to be light. “I just… write. Words are my only medium.”

The drive home was steeped in a new kind of quiet. The easy comfort of the evening was gone, replaced by a whirlwind inside Zoe’s head. The blue chalk. The smudge. Will’s strange, hidden acts of sensitivity the loophole for Finn, the ordered dinner when she was stressed. His intense dislike for art without soul, juxtaposed with his sterile professional work.

An impossible, crazy idea began to knit itself together in the back of her mind, fragile as a spider’s web.

It was absurd. Will Thorne was a corporate titan, a man of cold angles and colder logic. He didn’t roam the city’s underpasses in the dead of night. He didn’t create beautiful, temporary, heartbreaking art about loneliness and connection. He didn’t pour emotion onto concrete.

But as he drove, his hands steady on the wheel, his sharp profile illuminated by the passing streetlights, she remembered the way he’d looked at Finn. Not with annoyance, but with a quiet, almost wondrous curiosity. The way he’d said, “He survived. That’s brave enough.” It was the kind of simple, profound truth she associated with the voice of ArchiType on her blog, and the spirit of the street artist Wisp.

She looked down at her own hands, the hands that wrote other people’s stories while hiding her own. What if she wasn’t the only one in that penthouse living a double life? What if the most carefully constructed fiction of all was the one Will Thorne presented to the world every single day?

A single, vivid shade of blue has connected a dot in the past to a possibility in the present. Zoe’s suspicion is now a living, breathing thing: Could the man of cold contracts and calculated moves be the same soul who creates secret, ephemeral art that speaks directly to her heart? The line between her two mysterious men Will and the elusive Wisp has begun to dangerously blur.