CONTRACT TO FOREVER

EPISODE 2:THE WEDDING

The dress was white, which felt like a joke.

Emily stood in front of the mirror in a suite three floors below William's office, watching a stylist she'd never met pin the last of her hair into place, and tried to reconcile the woman in the glass with the one who'd clocked out of a sixteen-hour ER shift four days ago covered in someone else's blood. That woman had ridden the subway home. This one had a security detail standing outside her door.

"You look beautiful, Mrs. Hart," the stylist said, and Emily flinched at the name before she remembered it was already hers, or was about to be, on paper if nowhere else.

"It's Miss Carter, actually," she said. "Still."

"Not in about an hour it won't be." The stylist smiled like this was a happy thing to say, and Emily let her believe it.

Her mother had called that morning, voice still thin from the pre-op appointments, asking a hundred questions Emily couldn't fully answer. Who is he? How did you meet? Are you sure, baby? Emily had said what she'd rehearsed — a whirlwind, a good man, don't worry — and hated every syllable of the lie, even as she reminded herself the lie was the reason her mother would live to ask more questions.

A knock came at the door. Not the stylist's assistant, not the coordinator with her clipboard and headset. Emily knew before she opened it, the way she'd known in that glass office three days ago, that this particular knock belonged to him.

William stood in the hallway in a black suit that had clearly never touched a rack in a department store, and for a moment neither of them said anything. He looked at her the way he'd looked at her file that first night — cataloguing, assessing — except something about it now sat differently on his face, like a man checking a fact he'd already been fairly sure of and finding it confirmed.

"You clean up well, Miss Carter," he said.

"Soon to be Mrs. Hart. Apparently." She crossed her arms. "You're not supposed to see the bride before the ceremony. Bad luck."

"I don't believe in luck. I believe in preparation." He stepped inside without being asked, and she noted, not for the first time, that William Hart didn't seem to understand doors as things one waited to be invited through. "I came to brief you before you meet them."

Her stomach dropped. "The kids are here?"

"Downstairs. My sister brought them an hour ago." He reached into his jacket and produced a small velvet box, opening it without ceremony — no bent knee, no soft words, just a ring that probably cost more than the hospital wing her mother would recover in. He held it out to her like a work order. "Grace will test you. She tests everyone, and she's very good at it — smarter than most adults I employ. Do not try to win her over quickly. She'll see through it and shut you out for good. Leo won't speak much. Don't push him to. If he draws something and shows you, that's him trying. Treat it like the miracle it is. Ben will probably just want to be picked up. Let him."

Emily took the ring slowly, turning it over once before sliding it on. It fit. She didn't ask how he knew her size, and some cowardly part of her didn't want to know the answer. "And you? What do I need to know about you before I walk down there and marry you in front of a room of strangers?"

Something flickered across his face — the same c***k from the office, quick and gone. "That I keep my word. Whatever else you hear about me today, in that room, or ever — that part is true. I said your mother's surgery would be paid this morning. Check your phone."

She did. A confirmation email sat in her inbox, timestamped 7:02 a.m., from Bellevue General's billing office. Account paid in full. She had to blink hard, twice, before she trusted her voice.

"Thank you," she said, and meant it more than she'd meant almost anything she'd said to him so far.

"Don't thank me. It was the arrangement." But he didn't look away when he said it, and for a second the ice in his eyes seemed to be doing something complicated, something that looked almost like being seen was uncomfortable for him in a way he wasn't used to. He cleared his throat and stepped back toward the door. "The ceremony's brief. Twenty minutes. There's a dinner after, mostly business associates, people I need to convince this is real. You'll be seated beside me. Follow my lead and say as little as possible."

"Because I might embarrass you."

"Because the less you say, the less anyone can use against you later." For the first time, something that wasn't quite a smile touched his mouth. "This world eats people who talk too much, Miss Carter. I'd rather not feed it my wife in her first week."

He left before she could decide whether that had been a warning or, in his strange, armored way, a kindness.

Twenty minutes later, she walked down an aisle of white orchids toward a man she'd known for exactly three days, past a room of faces she didn't recognize, and stopped in front of three children in the front row who watched her with matching suspicion in their eyes — Grace's arms crossed exactly like her father's, Leo's hands twisting in his lap, Ben half-asleep against his aunt's shoulder, thumb in his mouth.

The officiant's words blurred past her. Do you take this man. She said yes because the alternative was a mother in a hospital bed with a heart that couldn't wait for anything more honest. William said his own vows in a voice so steady it was almost unsettling, and when he lifted the veil and their eyes met, she thought, absurdly, that she'd expected this moment to feel like a transaction closing.

It didn't. It felt like a door opening onto a house she hadn't seen the inside of yet, full of rooms she had no idea what she'd find in them.

"You may kiss the bride."

William leaned in, and the kiss was brief, careful, nothing more than the contract required — and still, when he pulled back, Emily's pulse was doing something it had absolutely no business doing for a man she'd married for a paycheck three days after meeting him.

Grace, in the front row, did not clap with the rest of the room. She simply watched Emily with an expression far too old for a nine-year-old's face, as if she already knew exactly how this story went and was waiting, arms crossed, for Emily to prove her wrong.