OVERTIME WIFE

Chapter 4: Terms

"Say it again."

"I said yes." Reese didn't look up from her phone, thumb still scrolling through the contract Ellis had sent over at six that morning, twelve hours after Danforth had physically hovered in her doorway waiting for an answer. "I need you to stop making me say it a third time. It's not going to feel better the third time."

Priya sat down across from her slowly, like she was approaching something that might still change its mind. "You said yes."

"Conditionally."

"There's no such thing as conditionally when it comes to Cole Bracken, Reese, there's just yes and there's the version of no you tell yourself while you're doing yes anyway."

Reese finally looked up. "Do you want me to keep the firm open or not?"

"I want both things to be true and I don't think they can be, that's the problem." Priya softened, reaching across the desk to close the laptop gently, the way you'd take a weapon out of a tired person's hand. "I'm not trying to talk you out of it. I just want to know you're going in with your eyes open. This isn't a normal account."

"I know what it is."

"Do you? Because on paper it's a six-month PR contract. In practice you're going to be photographed on his arm at every event in this city, answering questions about your relationship, smiling at a man whose name you can't say out loud most days without "

"I know what it is, Priya."

The office went quiet. Reese pressed her thumb and forefinger into the bridge of her nose, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to be a distraction from the actual problem, which was that Priya wasn't wrong about a single word of it.

"I set terms," she said finally. "Real ones. Not the soft version Ellis tried to slide past me first."

"Tell me."

Reese pulled up the document, turned her screen around. "Six months, no extension without my written consent. Public appearances only, no shared residences, no implication of anything beyond what's contractually required. I retain full creative control over messaging, which means I decide what version of him gets sold to the press, not Ellis. And " she paused on this one, because it had taken her an hour alone in her apartment to work up the nerve to add it " no questions about Danny. Not from him, not from Ellis, not staged into any interview. If a reporter asks, I control the redirect. That's non-negotiable."

Priya read it over twice. "He agreed to all of this?"

"Ellis agreed to all of this. I haven't heard from Cole directly since he left my office."

"That surprises me. He said, " Priya caught herself.

"He seemed what?"

"Nothing. I just read the coverage from the gala circuit last year. He's not usually the type who lets his agent do all the talking." Priya slid the laptop back across the desk. "For what it's worth, the terms are good. Better than good. If I didn't know the history I'd say you negotiated a client contract like it was any other Tuesday."

"It's not any other Tuesday."

"No," Priya agreed quietly. "It's really not."

The first joint appearance was scheduled for Thursday at a charity gala for the Ashford Youth Hockey Foundation, black-tie, press line on arrival, the kind of event where a story could either die quietly in a sea of camera flashes or catch fire depending entirely on the first thirty seconds of footage. Ellis had picked it deliberately. *Good optics,* he'd said on the call. *Kids, charity, redemption narrative writes itself.* Reese had said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't have sounded like what it actually was, which was disgust.

She met Cole in the hotel lobby forty minutes before the press line, and for a second just a second she almost didn't recognize him. Not because he looked different. Because he looked *nervous*, which she hadn't accounted for, hadn't built into any version of him she'd constructed in her head over three years of hating a stranger from a distance.

"You clean up well," he said, which was such an ordinary thing to say that it threw her more than anything clever could have.

"Don't."

"Don't compliment you?"

"Don't make this feel like a date. It isn't one. It's a job." Reese adjusted the strap of her clutch, mostly so she'd have somewhere to put her hands. "We walk the line together, you keep your hand at my waist, not lower, we answer exactly three questions from the pre-approved list Ellis sent over, and then we split up inside and work the room separately. That's the whole plan."

"That's not a plan, that's a hostage negotiation."

"It's the same thing, most nights, with your agent."

That got something out of him, not quite a laugh, but close, quick and surprised, like he hadn't expected to find anything funny tonight and resented that she'd made him. Reese filed the reaction away and told herself firmly not to enjoy having caused it.

The press line was exactly as bad as she'd braced for. Flashes, three deep on either side, a wall of shouted names *Cole! Cole, over here! Who's your date, Cole!* Reese held herself very still beside him, chin level, the practiced stillness of a hundred client events where she'd learned that panic photographed worse than almost anything else.

"Reese Kellan," Cole said, to the first reporter who asked, hand steady and correct at her waist exactly where they'd agreed. "She runs the best image firm in the city. I'm lucky she agreed to help me sort my mess out."

It was a good answer. Rehearsed-sounding in exactly the right way humble, self-aware, a man owning his scandal instead of dodging it. Reese smiled the smile she'd practiced in her bathroom mirror the night before and said nothing, because Ellis's plan called for her to say nothing, to be a presence rather than a voice, the steady woman standing beside the chaos.

It held four questions.

On the fifth, a reporter she didn't recognize was young, hungry, the kind who hadn't learned yet which questions got you banned from future press lines leaned past the rope with a phone already recording.

"Ms. Kellan, is it true your brother Danny Kellan's career ended on a hit from Mr. Bracken? How do you square dating the man who ended your brother's career?"

The flashes didn't stop. If anything they got faster, sensing blood, a dozen lenses swinging toward her face at once to catch whatever happened next.

Reese felt Cole's hand tighten, just slightly, at her waist not gripping, just present, like he was bracing to step in front of a hit he couldn't actually block. She didn't let him. She'd built her entire career on exactly this moment, the split second where the wrong answer became tomorrow's headline and the right one became a footnote, and she was not going to let a twenty-six-year-old blogger with a ring light take that from her.

"My brother's story isn't tonight's story," she said, calm, even, looking directly into the reporter's phone instead of away from it. "Tonight's about the Youth Hockey Foundation and the kids this gala funds. I'd ask you to respect that and respect my family enough not to make his recovery a headline he didn't consent to."

Silence, for exactly one beat. Then the next reporter shouted a question about Cole's contract status instead, the moment already moving on the way these moments always did, hungry for whatever came next.

Cole didn't say anything until they were past the line, inside, the noise of the gala swallowing them both. His hand dropped from her waist the second they cleared the doors, like he'd been waiting for permission to let go.

"You didn't have to do that," he said quietly.

"Do what?"

"Protect me. That question was about you, not me. You could've thrown me under the bus and it would've played fine like a sympathetic ex-victim's sister, cold unfeeling athlete, easy story."

Reese looked at him for a long moment, surprised, despite herself, that he'd noticed the shape of what she'd actually done.

"I didn't do it for you," she said. "I did it because I decide what story gets told about my family, not some blogger with a ring light. That was never about protecting you."

"Okay," Cole said, and something in his voice told her he didn't quite believe that, not entirely, though he had the good sense not to push it. "Still. Thank you."

Reese didn't answer. She turned toward the ballroom instead, toward the noise and the cameras and the six months stretching out in front of her like a debt she'd already started paying, and told herself, firmly, that whatever had just happened in that press line had been strategy and nothing else. She almost believed it.