Chapter 5: What Signing Feels Like
1929 Words
The revised agreement arrived Thursday at 11:47 p.m.
Not Friday morning. Not during business hours. Thursday night, when I was sitting at my kitchen table in a NYU sweatshirt with a bowl of cereal going soggy next to my laptop, trying to read a corporate governance textbook I'd checked out from the public library because I couldn't afford to buy it and also because apparently I processed stress by studying.
The email subject line was: Revised Agreement — Moore/Knight — v.2
No greeting. Just the attachment and a single line of body text: Revisions are highlighted in blue. My attorney's notes are in the margin comments. — LK
I opened the attachment.
He had accepted every condition I'd written on the legal pad.
Not negotiated down. Not reworded into something that looked like acceptance but functionally wasn't. Accepted, with clean tracked changes in blue and a margin note on my conscience clause that read, in what I assumed was the attorney's handwriting digitized: Unusual provision. Client insists. Retained as written.
Client insists.
I read that margin note three times.
Then I got up, poured the soggy cereal down the drain, made actual tea, came back, and read the entire eleven pages again from the beginning.
The debt relief clause had been revised to milestone payments exactly as I'd requested — $10,000 upon execution, $10,000 at the three-month mark, $10,000 at six months, and the final $10,000 upon completion or mutual early termination without cause. A separate clause specified that the monthly stipend continued through any agreed extension period.
The conduct standards were unchanged except for one addition, highlighted in blue: Both parties acknowledge that the arrangement described herein may require physical proximity consistent with a credible romantic partnership, including but not limited to: hand-holding, brief physical contact appropriate to a public setting, and attendance at events requiring extended close proximity. Neither party is obligated to perform contact that causes genuine discomfort; either party may signal discomfort using an agreed-upon phrase (see Appendix C).
I flipped to Appendix C.
Agreed discomfort signal: "I need some air." Either party may use this phrase in any setting to indicate the need to step back without explanation.
I sat with that for a moment.
Someone — him, probably, not the attorney — had thought about the fact that I might be uncomfortable. Had built in an exit phrase. Had made it mutual, applying to both of us, which meant he was acknowledging that he might need it too.
That was either very considerate or very calculated, and at 11:58 p.m. on a Thursday I did not have the emotional bandwidth to determine which.
My phone buzzed. A text from my college roommate, Maya, who lived in Brooklyn now and worked in nonprofit fundraising and had the energy of someone who had never once doubted that things would work out, which I both loved and found exhausting.
saw the page six thing. is that ur boss?? are you okay?? also that man is FINE jenna i'm just saying
I typed back: It's complicated. I'm fine. He's my employer.
Three dots. Then: those are not mutually exclusive
Then: also "employer" is doing a LOT of work in that sentence
Then: call me when you can talk
I set my phone down and looked at the agreement.
The thing about Maya was that she would tell me not to sign it. Not because it was wrong, exactly, but because Maya had a poet's relationship with authenticity and a nonprofit worker's relationship with corporate power, and she would look at this document and say something like "Jenna, you can't sell your story to buy your future" and she would mean it lovingly and she would be correct in a philosophical sense and I would still be $67,200 in debt when the conversation ended.
I couldn't tell Maya.
The non-disclosure clause was clear. And even setting aside the legal language, I understood why he needed it held tight. One leak to Page Six was already generating this much noise. If the arrangement itself leaked, the entire purpose collapsed. The credibility of the thing depended entirely on nobody knowing it wasn't real.
I was going to carry this alone.
I was used to carrying things alone.
I didn't sleep much.
Not because I was agonizing — I want to be clear about that. The decision had been made somewhere between the elevator and Sixth Avenue on Tuesday, and what I was doing now was not deciding but processing. There's a difference. Deciding is the moment the door swings. Processing is standing in the new room, running your hands along the walls, figuring out where the light switches are.
What kept me up was smaller than the contract.
It was the water stain on the ceiling, which had definitely crossed into Indiana now, and the radiator's twelve-minute knock, and the student loan servicer's automated text that had arrived at 9 a.m. yesterday morning with the cheerful cruelty of a system that did not know or care what else was happening in my life.
$67,200 outstanding balance. Minimum payment due: $412. Due date: February 28th.
Ten days. Then nine. Then eight.
I had $1,847. I could make the minimum payment and have $1,435 left, which would cover rent — just barely — and food — barely — and nothing else. No buffer. No error margin. No capacity to absorb a single unexpected expense, which in New York City in February in a pre-war building with a spreading water stain was not a theoretical risk but a statistical certainty.
The first milestone payment under the agreement was $10,000 upon execution.
Ten thousand dollars. Upon signing.
I stared at Indiana and made a list, the way I always made lists when I needed to stop feeling and start thinking.
What I am giving up: Uncomplicated professional standing. The ability to tell Maya everything. The guarantee that my presence in this company is entirely merit-based.
What I am getting: Financial stability for the first time in two years. Access to high-level corporate work that an unpaid internship would never provide. A front-row seat to a two-point-three-billion-dollar acquisition. And — I wrote this last, reluctantly, honestly — the first situation in eight months where I feel like my actual capabilities matter to someone who has the power to do something about it.
That last one made me uncomfortable.
I crossed it out. Then I could still read it, so I wrote over it in heavier pen strokes, which just made it more visible.
I gave up and went to sleep.
Friday morning.
I wore the best thing I owned — a navy blazer from a consignment shop on the Upper West Side that fit like it had been made for me by someone with significantly better taste than my budget suggested, dark trousers, and the kind of simple white blouse that said I am serious and I do not need to perform seriousness.
I did my makeup in the small bathroom mirror with the light that flickered on the left side, and I looked at myself for a moment before I left.
Twenty-four. Broke. Magna c*m laude. One working tote bag strap.
About to sign a contract that would change the next six months of my life in ways I could not fully predict.
Don't spiral.
I picked up my bag and went to catch the 6 train.
Diane was already at her desk when I arrived. She looked up, clocked the blazer, and said nothing. Which from Diane meant she'd noticed and was filing it away for future reference.
I sat down. Opened my laptop. Worked.
At 2:45 p.m., I took the executive elevator to fifty-eight.
The same reception desk. The same glass doors. The same northeast corner office with the city pressed against two walls of windows.
This time, Liam was at his desk when I walked in. Jacket on. A pen in his hand and what looked like a P&L statement open in front of him, which he closed when I entered — not quickly, just deliberately.
"Ms. Moore," he said.
"Mr. Knight," I said.
I sat in the same chair as before. He opened his desk drawer and placed a clean printed copy of the agreement — the v.2 revision — in the center of the desk between us. Next to it, a pen. Not the one from his hand. A fresh one, still in its packaging.
I looked at it. "You bought a new pen."
"My assistant did."
"Does your assistant know what this is?"
"She knows it's an important document that required a new pen." He held my gaze. "Do you have questions before you sign?"
I thought about it. Actually thought about it, not as a performance.
"The Seoul meeting," I said. "When?"
"First event is in three weeks. A charity gala. Lower stakes — it's domestic, it's press-facing, and Park's team will be monitoring coverage from overseas. We need to be visible, credible, and comfortable by then."
"Comfortable," I repeated.
"Meaning we need to not look like two people who met three weeks ago."
"We did meet three weeks ago."
"Four days ago," he corrected. "And yet here we are."
Something in his delivery was so flat that it took me a half-second to realize it was almost a joke. I filed that away.
"Appendix C," I said.
"I read it."
"You wrote it?"
A pause. "I suggested it."
"Why?"
He set down his pen. He looked at me with the direct, undecorated attention he had given me in every conversation we'd had, and said: "Because this arrangement requires a level of trust that I haven't earned yet. And I wanted you to know that the contract acknowledges that."
The room was quiet.
Outside, forty-eight floors down, the city hummed and churned and didn't care.
I picked up the pen.
I uncapped it.
I turned to the signature page.
Jenna A. Moore.
My handwriting was neat and even, which surprised me. I had expected my hand to shake, the way it did when I was nervous, the way it had the morning I defended my thesis. It didn't shake.
Maybe because I'd already decided on Tuesday.
Maybe because $10,000 and a chance and a man who built an exit clause into a contract were, combined, enough.
Maybe because I was twenty-four and broke and tired of playing it safe in a game where the safe moves kept losing anyway.
I set the pen down.
He picked it up. Signed on his line without reading the page again — he already knew what it said. He signed the way I imagined he signed everything: quickly, with full intention, like a decision he'd made before he sat down.
He closed the folder.
"Welcome to the arrangement, Ms. Moore," he said.
"Thank you, Mr. Knight," I said.
And then we sat in the particular silence of two people who had just agreed to something neither of them fully understood yet.
His phone rang. He glanced at it, then back at me.
"My PR advisor needs to meet with you," he said. "Monday, ten a.m. Her name is Sandra Cho. She's going to ask you questions that feel invasive."
"What kind of questions?"
"The kind that establish backstory." He looked at me steadily. "How we met. What you find charming about me. What I find charming about you."
I looked at him. "What do you find charming about me?"
He picked up the phone.
"That you didn't ask that question until after you signed," he said.
And he answered the call.
- Writer
