Contracted To My Rival

ARIA. The phone rings at 2 a.m. and I'm still at my desk. That part isn't unusual. What's unusual is the number. Not my assistant, not a board member, not some crisis bleeding through from our Singapore office. It's the estate line. The private one that barely anyone has, that almost never rings, that I haven't heard in months. I pick up on the second ring. "Aria." My grandmother's voice is thin. I mean structurally thin, like something that was iron for eighty years has started going at the seams. Helena Roth has made men twice her size reconsider their decisions with nothing but a look. She has sat at the head of a board table with three cracked ribs and run the meeting without anyone knowing. This voice is not that woman. This voice is afraid of the phone call it's making. Cold moves down my spine. I stand up without thinking. "Grand-mere." I call out. "Come to the estate. Now." She responds almost immediately, her breathe rushed out at the end. "It's two in the morning." I say. "I'm aware of what time it is." A pause, and inside that pause I can hear her breathing, which I've never been able to hear before. "Come. All of you need to be there." All of you? I don't ask what she means. I close my laptop and take my coat and I leave. … Forty minutes on empty roads. The city at this hour is a different city, quieter, more honest, all the performance stripped away. I drive myself. I don't call Adams. It's the middle of the night and what I'm feeling right now I don't want witnessed. I tell myself I'm being practical. Helena is sick, lung cancer, three months, managed privately the way Roth’s manage everything, and she's the last load-bearing wall of the old structure, and when she goes the architecture of this family shifts in ways I need to be ready for. That's what I'm thinking about. The practical shape of what comes next. I am not thinking about the way she said all of you. I'm not. The estate is lit up when I arrive, every window burning, which means something is wrong. Helena believes wasted electricity is wasted discipline. She has said this my entire life. I park and walk to the door faster than I mean to. Marta opens it before I knock. She doesn't speak. She steps aside, and that's when I hear them. Voices from the east wing, low and urgent. My father's voice. My mother's. Austin's. They're already here. Of course they are. Helena called all of us. I walk faster. … The room is too full. That's my first thought when I push open the door to Helena's bedroom. My father is standing near the window with his arms crossed, the way he stands when he's already decided something and is waiting for the room to catch up. My mother is in the chair nearest the door, back straight, hands folded, her face doing the thing it does when she's composed it specifically for difficult occasions. Austin is leaning against the far wall looking like a man who got dressed in a hurry and is trying not to show it, jacket on, shirt not quite tucked, hair not quite right. He looks at me when I walk in and his expression does something brief and complicated. And Helena. Helena is in the center of all of it, propped against her pillows with the oxygen mask pulled down around her neck, and she looks so small. Helena Roth has never looked small. My whole childhood she was the tallest presence in any room regardless of actual height, and seeing her like this, lands somewhere in my chest I'm not ready for. Her eyes find mine the moment I walk in. Sharp. Steady. Still completely her. I breathe in, an attempt to calm myself. "You drove yourself," she points out. "It's the middle of the night." I say. "Adams is paid—" "Grand-mere." I say it quietly. "What's happening?" The room goes still. My father unfolds his arms. My mother looks at her hands. Austin straightens off the wall. Helena reaches toward the bedside table. Her lawyer — a small, grey man I've seen at estate dinners before, Mr. Fenn, who has been Helena's attorney for thirty years — steps forward from the corner where he's been standing so quietly I didn't notice him until now. He places a leather-bound document in her hands. Helena takes it with both of hers and holds it like it weighs more than it does. "I asked you all here," she says, "because what I have to say concerns all of you, and I will not have it distorted in the retelling." My father makes a sound that isn't quite a word. "Helena, it's two in the morning—" "David." Just his name. The way she's always said it, like a door closing. He stops. She opens the document and reads. She reads slowly and clearly, and the room listens because when Helena Roth speaks in that particular register there is no other option. The will covers what I expect at first — the estate, the charitable foundations, the distribution of personal assets. My mother receives the house in Antibes and a private trust. Austin receives a sum that is generous and carefully calculated to be less than significant. My father receives exactly nothing, which is not a surprise to anyone in this room including him, and I watch his jaw tighten and I watch him decide to say nothing yet. Then Helena turns to the last section. And she reads the part about me. About Roth Consolidated. About the inheritance. About the condition attached to both. About Kael Vale. The room is absolutely silent for three full seconds. Then everyone speaks at once. "That's absurd—" My father voice sharp, it filled the room. "Mother, you can't be serious—" My mother said carefully. "Who is Kael Vale?" Austin, which tells me exactly how little he pays attention. I say nothing. I'm standing very still near the door and I'm looking at my grandmother and she is looking back at me and only at me, and her expression says: I know. I know what this is. I'm sorry for the shape of it. I'm not sorry I did it. My father steps forward. "This is a marriage contract. Arranged without Aria's knowledge or consent, binding her inheritance to a man who has spent the last seven years trying to eat into our market share. You want to hand him the keys to this family?" "I want to ensure this family survives the next generation," Helena says. "Which it will not do under current management." She doesn't look at my father when she says it. She keeps her eyes on me. "Mother—" "Aria is the company. She has been the company for six years while you've been positioning yourself to take it from her." Her voice is thin but the words are iron. "Kael Vale will not take it from her. He'll build it with her. There is a difference, David, and the fact that you can't see it is precisely why I'm doing this." The silence after that has a different quality. My father's face closes the way it does when he's moved something from the active file to the one he deals with later. My mother is looking at her hands again. Austin is watching me with an expression I can't fully read, which is unusual. Austin's expressions are usually readable because they're usually performed. This one isn't. And I am still standing near the door, still saying nothing, and I can feel everyone in the room waiting for me to react. Helena reaches under the document. She produces a separate envelope — cream, sealed with wax, a crest I don't recognize. She holds it out toward me. "This is the contract itself. Read it. Then ask your questions." I cross the room. I take it from her hands and sees the wax is already broken. "You don't have to accept this," My father says, from behind me. His voice has shifted — softer now, the version he uses when he wants something. "We'll contest it. The grounds are clear. Undue influence, diminished—" "Choose your next word carefully," Helena says, and even thin, even from a bed with an oxygen mask around her neck, she makes the room go quiet. My father closes his mouth. I pull out the pages. Three of them, tightly typed. I stand in the middle of my grandmother's bedroom surrounded by my family and I read. I read the first paragraph and something in me goes very still. I read it again. "This is a marriage contract," I say. My voice comes out level. I've trained it for years to do exactly that regardless of what's happening underneath. "Yes." "Between me and Kael Vale." Not a question. A confirmation. "Yes." I keep reading. There's a clause near the bottom I go over three times. If I don't marry him within one month of Helena's death, I lose my inheritance and my seat at Roth Consolidated. Executive Director. The role I've built myself toward since I was sixteen. Gone, to the board's discretion, which means my father... "You arranged this ten years ago," I say. "Yes." "Without telling me." I pointed out, I could feel my eye already twitching from anger. "You were eighteen. You would have been unreasonable about it." She says in a slightly apologetic tone. "I'm unreasonable about it now," I say. Perfectly calmly. Ignoring the turmoil within me. She almost smiles. I'm too furious to find it anything other than exactly like her. "This is outrageous," my father says, and he's talking to Helena but he's looking at me. "Aria, you don't have to—" "No one asked you," I say flatly. He goes quiet. Even Austin looks mildly startled. I look at my grandmother. "Helena." I use her name. I use her name when I need her to know I'm speaking to her and not to the matriarch, not to the title. "You cannot do this to me." "It's already done." "He is my rival. We have been fighting over the same ground for seven years—" "I know what he is." Her voice is thin but she doesn't look away from me for a single second. "He is also the only person in your world who has ever made you feel like you weren't already winning. You need that, Aria. You need someone who doesn't let you disappear into the performance of yourself." She pauses to breathe. "I would not have done this if I wasn't certain." I stand there. My father is fuming somewhere to my right. My mother is silent. Austin is watching me with that unreadable expression and I don't have the capacity to deal with it right now. I look at the document one more time. At the signatures. At the second one, beneath the notary's seal. "Who signed for him?" Helena's face changes. Something softens in it, something private that isn't meant for the whole room. "His mother," she says quietly. "She came to me herself. Years ago. She asked me." A pause, a careful breath. "She was a good woman. She believed in her son before the world had any reason to." Her eyes hold mine. "So did me." No one speaks. My father makes one more attempt, something about legal advisors, and Helena simply closes her eyes, and Mr. Fenn steps forward and says quietly that the meeting is concluded and perhaps everyone might give Mrs. Roth some rest. People begin to move. My mother touches my father's arm. Austin looks at me once more, that same complicated look, and then follows them out. I'm the last one to go. I stand at the door with the contract in my hands and I look back at her and I want to say something, I don't know what, something true, something that isn't anger and isn't agreement and isn't the performance of either. But the words aren't there. Or maybe they are and I can't get to them. I leave without saying goodbye. I drive back through the dark with the contract on the passenger seat and my family's voices still in my head, my father's fury, my mother's silence, Austin's unreadable eyes, and somewhere underneath all of it, Helena's voice saying she would not have done this if she wasn't certain. I don't know what to do with that. It's not until I'm standing in my kitchen, coat still on, lights off, that I realize I didn't say goodbye. And that I might not get another chance.