Somewhere Between Us

Chapter 3: Terms and Conditions

Two days after she came back, Zoey found herself in a lawyer's office that smelled like leather and old money, and the man behind the desk, Mr. Halloway, silver-haired, unbothered, the kind of attorney who'd clearly drafted a hundred agreements stranger than this one, slid a stack of papers across the table like he was dealing cards.

"Standard prenuptial framework," he said. "Modified, obviously, for the circumstances."

"Obviously," Zoey echoed, and did not touch the papers yet. Dylan, beside her, had his ankle crossed over his knee and an expression of a man watching a mildly entertaining show. "I'd like to go through it line by line."

"Of course you would," Dylan murmured.

"I don't sign things I haven't read. It's a personality flaw."

"It's the opposite of a flaw. It's just inconvenient for me." He nodded at Halloway. "Line by line, then."

They went through it for forty minutes, the length of the marriage, the compensation structure, the confidentiality clauses that seemed to multiply the longer she looked at them. Zoey caught two errors in the financial section and one contradiction in the residency clause, and Halloway, to his credit, looked less annoyed than genuinely impressed, jotting notes each time.

"You should've been a lawyer," he said.

"I considered it. But I have always dreamt of being a fashion designer and I did the math on law school debt and became a transcriptionist instead. Poetic, really."

Dylan glanced at her sideways, something unreadable crossing his face before the smirk reclaimed it. "You transcribe legal documents for a living and now you're negotiating one. Should I be worried?"

"Terrified," she said. "I charge extra for irony."

When the financial terms were settled, Halloway excused himself to draft the finalized language, leaving them alone in the office with a pot of untouched coffee and a silence that Zoey used to actually look at the man she was apparently about to marry.

"I have conditions," she said. "Ones that aren't in the paperwork."

"I'm listening."

"My family doesn't come up. Not to your board, not to your stepmother, not to a single reporter who thinks it's cute to dig into my background. My mother is sick. My siblings are kids. None of them signed up to be part of a business arrangement, and I won't have them turned into a headline because some journalist thinks 'penniless bride' makes a better story than 'convenient wife.'"

Something in Dylan's expression shifted, not the teasing lightness he wore like armor, but something more attentive, like he was recalibrating an assumption. "Done. Easily done, actually. I'd have offered that anyway."

"Would you have?"

"I don't need your family in this. I need a believable marriage, not an exposé." He studied her for a moment. "You really thought I'd use them."

"I didn't know what to think. I still don't, really. You're a stranger who offered me a fortune to wear a ring for a year. Forgive me for assuming the worst."

"Fair," he admitted, and there was no offense in it, which she found, irritatingly, made her like him slightly more. "Anything else?"

"Separate bedrooms."

"I would hope so. I don't share a bed with people I'm not sleeping with, and I have a strict policy against changing that for tax purposes."

"Glad we agree." She ignored the warmth crawling up her neck and pressed on. "No public displays that go further than necessary. Hand-holding, sure. A kiss for cameras if we absolutely must. Nothing that implies anything real, because it isn't real, and I don't want to spend a year confusing myself about that."

"Noted." Something flickered in his eyes, amusement, maybe, or the faintest challenge. "Anything else on your list, or are we negotiating the exact centimeters of hand-holding permitted?"

"I'm being thorough."

"You're being terrifying. It's working for you." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "My turn, then. You don't ask about my family's history beyond what's necessary to play the part. My stepmother, my stepsiblings, you'll meet them, you'll be polite, you'll let them believe whatever they want to believe about us. But you don't dig. Not into them, not into my father, not into anything that happened before I was running this company."

"Why?"

"Because it's not part of the arrangement." His voice had gone flat, controlled in a way that told her more than the words did, that this wasn't a preference, it was a wall, carefully maintained. "And because some things aren't mine to explain to someone I've known for two weeks."

"Fine," she said, though the refusal snagged at her curiosity more than she wanted to admit. She was good at reading people. Had to be, in a life that required reading landlords and doctors and the particular silence of a mother trying not to worry her children. Dylan Sterling's silence, just now, had the texture of something carefully built over a long time, brick by brick, and she filed it away the way she filed away everything she didn't yet understand. "One more thing."

"Of course there is."

"If this is going to work, I need to know what I'm walking into. Not secrets. Just, logistics. Who's actually going to be at this wedding? Who am I supposed to convince?

Dylan exhaled, some of the guardedness easing back into something more performable. "My stepmother, Marguerite. She'll want to help plan everything, and you should let her, because refusing would look strange and because she's genuinely good at parties, infuriatingly. My stepbrother, Julian, who will not like me and will make sure everyone knows it, subtly. My stepsister, Claire, who's the only one of them worth trusting, for what that's worth."

"That's a cheerful family portrait."

"We're complicated," he said simply, without elaboration, and she recognized, again, the wall going back up. "You'll manage. You managed me in a coffee shop with zero preparation. This will be easier."

"I doubt that very much."

"You're allowed to doubt it. Just don't let them see you doubt it." He stood, buttoning his jacket, some of his usual ease returning now that the harder conversation had passed. "Halloway will have the final draft by tomorrow. We sign, we announce, and then, Ms. Adams, you and I are going to have to convince the entire city that we're in love."

"Terrifying," she said again, though this time it came out quieter, less certain, and she hated how much he seemed to notice.

"You keep saying that." He held the door open for her, something almost gentle in the gesture despite the smirk still tugging at his mouth. "I'm starting to think you don't mean it."

She didn't answer, mostly because she wasn't sure what the honest answer was, and let him walk her out past Halloway's assistant, who was already typing up a press release announcing the engagement of Dylan Sterling to a name the world had never heard of.

By the time Zoey got home that night, the story was already online, Sterling Heir to Marry Mystery Woman, her photo nowhere in it yet, her name misspelled once in the caption. She stared at the headline for a long time, phone light throwing shadows across her mother's dim kitchen, and thought about pride, and math, and the particular vertigo of watching her whole life get rewritten in a single afternoon by a man she'd known for eleven days.

There was no going back now. The wedding was in three weeks.