CONTRACTUALLY YOURS

CHAPTER 1: The Morning Everything Changed

The pancake hit the floor and Luca looked up from his dinosaurs.

"Mama."

"I see it."

"Gerald sees it too."

The pan was still smoking on the counter where I had dropped it and the acquisition notice was still open on my phone screen and the kitchen smelled like burnt batter and something that had no name but sat in the back of the throat and would not move.

I picked the pancake up. Put it in the bin. Ran the tap over the pan and listened to the hiss of it and gripped the edge of the sink with both hands until my knuckles went pale.

"Is breakfast resting again," Luca said.

"Breakfast is resting again."

He accepted this with the gravity it deserved and went back to positioning Gerald on the counter with the focused attention of a surgeon. Four years old and he had never once questioned why breakfast rested. He simply filed it under things that happened and moved on, which was more than I was managing this particular Monday morning.

I read the message again without picking the phone up.

Voss Enterprises. Final acquisition confirmed. Report to headquarters.

Monday. Nine a.m.

David had forwarded it at six fifty three with three question marks. David, who had once told me I was being sued in the same tone he used to ask about milk in his coffee. Three question marks from David meant the kind of trouble that did not have a clean solution waiting on the other side of it. Three question marks from David meant call me immediately and brace yourself for what I am about to tell you.

I made eggs instead.

Luca climbed onto his stool and arranged Gerald facing the window and began a quiet and detailed briefing about what dinosaurs ate for breakfast if they were not extinct, which apparently varied significantly by species and by season and by whether the particular dinosaur in question had managed a full eight hours the previous night.

I put his plate in front of him.

He looked at it. He looked at Gerald. Some silent communication passed between them that I had learned over four years not to interrupt.

"Gerald thinks eggs are acceptable," Luca said finally.

"Tell Gerald I appreciate his flexibility."

Luca relayed this in a serious undertone and Gerald's response was apparently favourable because Luca picked up his fork and ate without further negotiation, which on a Monday morning when my life was quietly disintegrating was the closest thing to a miracle I was going to receive.

I stood at the counter with my coffee going cold and my phone face down and the acquisition notice sitting underneath it like something with weight and temperature and I kept my back to my son so he could not see what my face was doing.

Outside the kitchen window Brooklyn was doing its morning. The particular sound of it, school runs and coffee orders and the distant reliable percussion of a city that did not pause for anyone's personal crisis, which was either a comfort or an insult depending entirely on the day.

Today it was an insult.

I called David from the bathroom while Luca finished his eggs.

"Tell me something good," I said the second he picked up.

"I cannot tell you something good," he said. "I can tell you exactly how bad it is if that helps you prepare."

"Does it help."

"Probably not." Papers moved in the background. The particular sound of David organising information he would rather not deliver. "The acquisition is clean Mia. Every document, every filing, every process. I have been through it twice this morning and there is nothing to push back on. They did everything correctly and thoroughly and in a way that left us no gaps."

"There is nothing," I said.

"There is nothing," he said.

I sat on the edge of the bathtub and looked at the tile and said nothing for a moment.

"Monday," I said.

"Monday," he said. "Nine a.m. I would not be late."

I ended the call and sat in the bathroom and listened to Luca singing to himself in the kitchen, that tuneless happy sound he produced when he was entirely satisfied with the world around him, and I pressed both palms flat against my thighs and breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth until the bathroom walls stopped feeling like they were leaning inward.

Then I stood up and went back to the kitchen and washed the pan and dried it carefully and hung it on the hook and kissed Luca on the top of his head and told him to go find his shoes because we were leaving in ten minutes.

"Can Gerald come," he said.

"Gerald always comes," I said.

He slid off his stool with Gerald already secured in his fist and disappeared down the hallway with the purposeful energy of someone who had places to be and was not going to let anyone slow him down, and I stood alone in the kitchen with my hand flat on the counter and the acquisition notice waiting on my phone and the name Damien Voss sitting at the back of my throat where it had lived for three years without ever fully going away.

I picked the phone up.

I opened a browser tab.

My fingers moved across the screen before any sensible thought arrived to redirect them. Three years of not searching, three years of careful and deliberate discipline, and my hands typed his name anyway like they had been waiting all this time for permission that was never coming.

Damien Voss.

The results loaded instantly.

His face filled the screen.

Dark eyes. Sharp jaw. The particular stillness of a man photographed so many times he had learned to give the camera nothing at all, standing outside a glass building with his name on it in letters large enough to read from the opposite side of the street, looking into the lens like a man who owned everything the lens could reach.

My phone slipped in my fingers.

Down the hallway Luca called out that he could not find his left shoe and Gerald was also missing and could I please come and help because the situation was becoming urgent.

I looked at the face on my screen.

I looked at it for three full seconds.

Then I put the phone in my pocket and went to find the shoes.