CONTRACTUALLY YOURS

CHAPTER 5: Every Option

Jade opened the door before I knocked.

She took one look at my face and stepped back and let me in and closed the door behind me and did not say a single word until I was sitting at her kitchen table with both hands wrapped around a cup of tea I did not remember being given.

Then she sat across from me and said, "Start from the beginning."

I started from the beginning.

I told her everything. The boardroom and the window and the way he turned around. The photograph of Luca on the pavement outside his daycare in the red coat with the hood. The twelve pages I read in full while he sat at the head of the table and let me read without rushing me. The terms, all of them, one year, the penthouse, Luca's name, the studio returned without condition, the courts kept out of our lives. Page nine and the clause I did not trust and the way his face moved when I mentioned it, just barely, just once, before the composure came back and covered it.

Jade listened to all of it without moving.

When I finished she picked up her cup and put it down again without drinking from it and stood up and went to the window and looked at the street below with her arms crossed and her jaw tight and I watched her back and waited.

"He has known for six months," she said.

"Yes."

"Six months of knowing and he spent that time building a legal position instead of picking up a phone."

"Yes."

She turned around. Her eyes were bright and her voice was completely level which with Jade meant the opposite of calm. "He sat across from you in a boardroom and handed you a marriage contract like you were a company he was acquiring."

"He handed me a marriage contract like a man who knew exactly what leverage he had and had arranged it very carefully before using it," I said.

Jade looked at me for a moment.

Then she pulled her chair out and sat back down and put both forearms on the table and leaned forward. "Options," she said. "We go through every one."

We went through every one.

Fight the acquisition legally. David had already closed that door, clean paperwork, no gaps, nothing to push back against. Jade pushed anyway and I pushed with her and we pulled that option apart from every angle and it stayed closed.

Negotiate different terms. I could go back to Damien and counter. Shorter timeline, different living arrangement, looser public appearance requirements. Jade liked this option for eleven minutes until we both arrived at the same place simultaneously, that negotiating required leverage and leverage required something he did not already hold, and Damien Voss was sitting across a table that he had spent six months making sure held everything.

Walk away entirely. Leave the studio, take Luca, start again somewhere else. Jade put this one on the table and we both looked at it and I reached across and picked up my coffee cup and put it down and Jade took it off the table herself without saying anything because we both knew what four years of everything I had built meant and what walking away from it would cost and what it would tell Luca someday when he was old enough to understand the story.

Court. Fight custody through the proper channels, let the lawyers handle it, trust the family court process to see what was right. Jade put this one down last and carefully and we sat with it the longest. I picked it up and held it and turned it over and put it down again because a family court process meant Damien's lawyers against David and David was excellent and Damien's lawyers were a different category of excellent entirely and at the end of it a judge would decide something about my son's life that I had been deciding alone for four years.

Every option closed.

Every single one.

Jade sat back in her chair and looked at the ceiling and blew out a long slow breath and when she looked back at me her face had the particular expression of someone who had arrived at a conclusion they did not want to arrive at and were not going to pretend otherwise.

"He holds everything," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"Every card."

"Every single one."

She reached across the table and put her hand over mine and squeezed once and held it and neither of us said anything for a while because there was nothing to say that was bigger than sitting there together in the quiet of her kitchen while the afternoon moved outside the window.

My phone rang.

We both looked at it on the table between us.

His name on the screen.

Damien Voss.

Jade's hand tightened over mine.

I watched it ring. Four times. Five. Six. The screen stayed lit and his name stayed on it and my hand stayed flat on the table under Jade's and I did not move.

It stopped.

The kitchen went quiet again.

No voicemail notification. No follow up message. Nothing except the particular silence of a phone that had rung and been unanswered and had accepted that outcome without comment.

Jade opened her mouth.

A knock at my front door stopped her.

We looked at each other.

I went to the door.

A courier in a jacket with a logo on the chest stood in the hallway holding a flat white envelope. He checked my name, confirmed it, handed it over, and was gone before I had finished reading the front of it.

My name. In handwriting that was clean and precise and completely certain of itself.

I stood in the doorway of Jade's apartment with the envelope in both hands and Jade appeared at my shoulder and looked at it and said, very quietly, "Open it."

My thumb moved under the seal.