OVERTIME WIFE

Chapter 3: Nine A.M.

"You're late."

"I'm four minutes early."

"You're late," Reese said again, not looking up from the folder in front of her, "because I expected you to cancel, and you didn't, and now I have to deal with you in person instead of just telling Ellis no a third time by phone."

Cole stood in the doorway of her office a second longer than he needed to. He'd expected he wasn't sure what he'd expected. Not this. Not a woman who looked like she hadn't slept much and didn't care if it showed, who hadn't so much as glanced up at him yet, who was flipping through what he was fairly sure was his own press file like it personally owed her money.

"Ellis told me you said no twice," he said. "I didn't realize there was a third no coming."

"There is if you keep standing in my doorway."

He sat down anyway, in the chair across from her desk, because that seemed like the version of this conversation that ended fastest. Up close she was younger than her photo made her look, and sharper the kind of sharp that came from practice, not luck.

"I know who you are," she said, finally looking up. Her eyes were steady. Steadier than his, probably. "I want to be clear about that before we start. I'm not confused about who's sitting in my office."

"Good," Cole said. "Neither am I."

Something flickered across her face not quite a surprise, but close to it, like she'd expected him to dodge and he hadn't. "Then you understand why the answer's no."

"I understand why it should be. I still came."

"Because your agent's desperate."

"Because my agent's desperate," Cole agreed. No point lying about it; she'd have seen through it in a second, and something told him a lie right now would end this meeting faster than the truth would. "Three teams are circling a trade. My biggest sponsor pulled in under an hour. I've got maybe a week before the story hardens into whatever version of me the league decides to believe, and Ellis says you're the only person in this city who could change that in time."

"Flattering." Reese closed the folder. "Still no."

"You haven't heard of the offer."

"I don't need to hear the offer. I know exactly what image-repair work looks like, Mr. Bracken, I've built a career doing it. I also know that whatever number your agent's prepared to write on a contract isn't going to change the fact that I'm supposed to sit across a table from you every week for months, smiling for cameras, and pretend I don't know what your name means to my family."

That landed the way she meant it to. Cole felt it land a clean hit, the kind he used to take on the ice and shake off before the whistle even finished blowing. He didn't shake this one off as easily.

"I know," he said. "I'm not going to pretend I don't. I thought about not coming at all, for exactly that reason."

"But you came anyway."

"Because Ellis told me you already said no twice, and I figured if I was going to ask you to help save my career, the least I could do was ask you to my face instead of hiding behind an agent's phone call."

Reese studied him for a long moment, and Cole made himself hold still under it, made himself not fill the silence the way he usually did when a room got quiet and uncomfortable. He'd learned, over the years, that silence usually told you more about a person than anything they said to fill it.

"How's Danny," she said, finally, and it wasn't really a question it was a test, and they both knew it.

"I don't know," Cole said honestly. "I haven't spoken to him since the hearing. I didn't think I had the right to."

"You don't."

"I know that too."

Reese leaned back in her chair, arms crossed, and Cole watched her decide something, though he couldn't have said what. "You want to know what the offer is," he said, "or you want to keep interrogating me about whether I deserve to be in this office."

"Can't I do both?"

"You've been doing both for the last five minutes."

The corner of her mouth almost moved. Almost. She caught it before it became anything real. "Tell me about the offer. I'm still saying no. I just want to know what I'm turning down."

Cole reached into his jacket, pulled out the single printed page Ellis had put together at eleven the night before clean, simple, the kind of document designed to look reasonable even when the thing it was asking for wasn't. He set it on her desk instead of handing it to her, because something told him handing it to her directly would end this worse.

"A relationship," he said. "Public. Six months, renewable. Appearances, interviews, a story the league and the sponsors can get behind a version of me that isn't a headline from a bar fight I didn't start."

"You didn't start it."

"No."

"Doesn't matter. Nobody's going to ask."

"No," Cole agreed. "They're not."

Reese didn't touch the page. She looked at it the way you'd look at something that might be contagious. "You're asking me to fake-date the man who ended my brother's career."

"I'm asking you to save my career," Cole said, quieter now, all the practiced calm gone out of it. "I know it's the same sentence to you. I know exactly how it sounds. I'm asking anyway, because Ellis says you're the best in the city at this, and because and I mean this the way it sounds, not as a line I would rather sit across from someone who hates me honestly than someone who'd smile at me and mean nothing by it."

Reese was quiet a long time after that. Long enough that Cole started to think he'd finally said the thing that ended this for good.

"My firm's dying," she said, and it clearly cost her something to say it out loud, in this room, to him of all people. "Danforth's giving me a month before he pulls funding. If I say no to you, and I lose the Callahan-sized gap in our quarter some other way, four people lose their jobs. People who have nothing to do with you, or Danny, or any of this."

"I know."

"You don't know. You can't know. You've never had to choose between your own history and someone else's paycheck."

"You're right," Cole said. "I haven't. I'm not going to pretend I understand what this costs you. I'm just telling you the truth, which is that I need you to say yes, and I have no right to ask, and I'm asking anyway because I've run out of better options."

Reese picked up the page, finally, and read it in silence long enough that Cole made himself sit still through all of it, hands flat on his knees, not filling the quiet.

"Six months," she said at last, not looking up. "Public appearances only. No press access to anything real. And the second I decide this isn't working, it ends no negotiation, no extension, no convincing me otherwise."

"Done."

"I haven't said yes."

"You will."

Her eyes came up sharp at that, something dangerously close to a real reaction in them for the first time since he'd walked in. "Don't do that. Don't tell me what I'm going to decide in my own office."

"You're right." Cole held up both hands. "Sorry."

Reese looked back down at the page, at Ellis's careful, reasonable language dressing up something that wasn't reasonable at all, and Cole watched her jaw tighten the way people's jaws tightened when they were about to agree to something they already knew they'd regret.

"I need twenty-four hours," she said.

"You have until tomorrow morning. Ellis has a press event Thursday he wants us to know if this happens."

"Get out of my office, Mr. Bracken."

He stood. At the door he stopped, half-turned back, because there was one more thing he needed to say and he wasn't sure he'd get another chance to say it without an audience.

"I know why you hate me," he said. "I'd hate me too."

Reese didn't answer. She was still looking at the page on her desk, and she didn't look up again until she heard the door close behind him and then, alone, she put both hands flat on the desk the way she had in her office the day before, and breathed, and didn't reach for her phone to call Danforth with an answer for a long, long time.