CONTRACTUALLY YOURS

CHAPTER 2: Forty Eight Hours

Jade was at my door before I had my coat off.

She had a key for emergencies and apparently a Monday morning acquisition notice qualified because she was standing in my kitchen with two coffees from the good place on her corner and an expression that meant she had already decided how she felt about everything and was prepared to hold that position indefinitely.

"Talk," she said.

I put my bag on the counter. I took the coffee. I sat down on the stool where Luca had eaten his eggs three hours ago and Gerald was still positioned facing the window where Luca had left him, standing watch over a Brooklyn street that had no idea anything was wrong.

I talked.

Jade listened without interrupting, which was not her natural state but which she managed when the situation demanded it, both hands wrapped around her cup, eyes on my face, taking everything in with the focused attention of someone building a case.

When I finished she was quiet for a moment.

"He bought your company," she said.

"Yes."

"Damien Voss bought your company."

"That is what the notice says."

She put her cup down on the counter very carefully, which with Jade meant she was choosing her next words with equal care.

"And you have to go in on Monday."

"Nine a.m."

She looked at Gerald on the windowsill. She looked back at me.

"Have you called David," she said.

"This morning. From the bathroom while Luca ate his eggs."

"And."

"And there is nothing. The acquisition is clean. David used the word thorough twice which means he looked very hard for a gap and found absolutely none."

Jade picked her coffee back up. She took a long slow sip and looked at the ceiling the way she did when she was deciding how honest to be, and with Jade completely honest and diplomatically honest were two very different destinations.

She went with completely honest.

"Mia," she said. "Out of every company in this city. Out of every acquisition Voss Enterprises has made in the last eight years." She paused. "You do not think that is strange."

I stood up and took my coffee to the window and looked at the street below and said nothing.

"I think it is a coincidence," I said.

Jade said nothing.

"It is a large city," I said. "Companies acquire other companies every day. There is no reason to assume that he even knows who runs Collins Creative. These things are handled by teams of people and lawyers and the CEO is rarely involved in the details of a small studio acquisition."

Jade still said nothing.

I turned around.

She was looking at me with the expression she reserved for occasions when I was saying something she found deeply unconvincing and had decided that pointing that out directly would be less effective than simply waiting.

"It is a coincidence," I said again.

"Okay," she said.

We both knew what okay meant when Jade said it in that particular tone.

I picked Luca up from daycare at three fifteen. He came out holding a painting that he presented to me with great ceremony on the pavement outside, a landscape of considerable ambition featuring what appeared to be a purple sky and several large creatures he identified as prehistoric marine reptiles engaged in what he described as a friendly disagreement.

I held it with both hands and told him it was extraordinary.

He accepted this as accurate and took my hand and we walked home and he told me about his day in the particular Luca way, chronological and thorough and occasionally circling back to correct an earlier detail he felt he had not represented accurately enough, and I held his hand and listened and laughed in the right places and felt the weight of Monday sitting across my shoulders the whole way home.

I made his favourite dinner. Pasta with the sauce from the jar that I added things to so it tasted less like a jar. He ate with Gerald propped against his glass and narrated a detailed account of Gerald's preferred pasta shapes, which differed from his own preferences in ways he found philosophically interesting.

Bath. Books. Two chapters of the dinosaur encyclopaedia he had been working through since his birthday, one page at a time, with the patience of a scholar.

I sat on the edge of his bed in the dark after and listened to his breathing slow and watched Gerald tucked under his arm and the dinosaur encyclopaedia on the nightstand and the small certain peace of him sleeping and stayed there considerably longer than I needed to.

Then I went to the bathroom floor.

Not the bathtub. The floor, with my back against the cabinet and my phone in both hands and the cold tile coming through my pyjamas and three years of not searching dissolving into forty minutes of searching everything.

Damien Voss. Thirty two years old. Forbes cover, three times. Net worth that required a moment to process. The company his father had left him, mid-sized and unremarkable, transformed in eight years into something with its name on buildings across four continents.

Photographs at galas. Photographs outside courtrooms. Photographs on the covers of things that photographed men who moved the world.

Always the same expression. That particular contained stillness. Giving the camera nothing.

I scrolled and scrolled and told myself coincidence and almost believed it until I found the article dated fourteen months ago that made my hand go completely still on the screen.

Damien Voss ends engagement to Victoria Crane. No statement from either party.

I looked at the date.

I looked at it again.

Fourteen months ago.

Three years ago minus fourteen months left a window I had been trying very hard not to calculate and had just calculated anyway.

I put the phone face down on the cold tile.

Outside the bathroom window Brooklyn kept moving.

Inside the bathroom the silence was complete.