Two Empires, One Heart

Chapter Nine

The Calloway proposal sat between us for three days before Freya and I agreed on a single line of it.

We'd taken over the study for the occasion, papers spread across every surface, the good pen my father kept in his desk drawer for decades finally getting some use again. Freya worked the way she did everything, methodically, circling clauses in red ink and muttering numbers under her breath like a woman arguing with someone who wasn't in the room.

"The northern properties are worth more than they're offering," she said, tapping the page hard enough that her pen nearly went through it. "Forty percent more, if their own comparables from last quarter are accurate, which means either their lawyer is sloppy or they're hoping we won't check."

"Which do you think it is?"

"With that family? I'd put money on hoping." She didn't look up. "Careless people get comfortable when they've never had to actually fight for anything. The Calloways have been coasting on their name for longer than they'd like anyone to notice."

I sat across from her with a folder open in my lap, reading the same paragraph for the fourth time, letting the language settle into something I actually understood instead of something I simply trusted someone else to have read for me. Two years of signing whatever was placed in front of me had left a kind of atrophy I was only now starting to notice, a muscle I hadn't used in so long it ached simply waking up.

My father wandered in around nine, in his reading glasses and the same cardigan he seemed to own in four identical colors, and settled into the armchair by the window without a word, the way he'd started doing most evenings that week. He didn't correct us. He mostly watched, occasionally humming to himself over something in the newspaper, present in a way that felt less like supervision and more like company.

"You've got your mother's patience for this," he said, when I finally caught an inconsistency buried in a footnote on page eleven, a clause that would have cost us two percent on the back end if it had slipped past unnoticed. "She used to find things like that just to watch the lawyers sweat. She'd sit through an entire meeting saying nothing, then ask one question at the very end that unraveled the whole proposal."

"I don't remember her that way." I looked up from the page. "I remember her humming while she cooked. I don't remember her in rooms like this at all."

"You were young." He said it gently, no correction in it, only fact, folding his newspaper closed. "There's a great deal about her you'll get to know now, watching yourself do the things she used to do without anyone having taught you how."

I turned that over for longer than I expected to, the strange idea that some part of a person could live on in a daughter who barely remembered her, resurfacing decades later in a boardroom neither of them had ever shared.

By midweek, Freya and I had reworked the terms into something we were both willing to sign our names to, and I sat beside her at the kitchen table on the night we finalized it, watching her read the final draft aloud one last time before sending it, the way she always did before anything left the house officially.

"Distribution rights on the northern properties, adjusted to reflect actual market comparables," she read, "public statement of partnership contingent on renegotiated terms, effective ninety days from signature." She glanced at me over the page. "Your addition, the ninety day contingency. I wouldn't have thought of that."

"If his father's family is as unstable as the papers are suggesting, I didn't want us locked into anything permanent before we know what we're actually aligning ourselves with." I shrugged, feeling oddly proud of the sentence even as I said it. "Trust, but verify. Isn't that what you always say?"

"I say it. I didn't expect you to actually listen." A small, real smile crossed her face, quick and unguarded. "Feels different, doesn't it. Being in the room instead of just being the reason someone else has to be in it."

"Get used to it," I said, echoing something she'd told me only days before, and watched her laugh, short and surprised, the sound of it settling into the kitchen like it belonged there.

We sent the counter proposal the following morning. I stood at the window while Freya hit send, watching the courier's car pull away down the long drive, and felt something I hadn't expected to feel about a business contract, something close to pride, quiet and unfamiliar, settling into a version of myself I was only just beginning to recognize as mine again.