COLD TERMS

EPISODE FIVE THE FIRST NIGHT

She signed on a Friday.

The lawyer's office smelled like wood polish and expensive paper, which Aria was beginning to understand was just the smell of rooms where serious amounts of money changed hands. There were two witnesses she didn't know — a woman in her forties who worked for Crest Industries' legal team and a young man who appeared to be an assistant of some kind and who looked at his phone twice during the signing, which Aria found oddly comforting.

Damian sat across the table in a dark grey suit. He did not look nervous, which was consistent with her growing understanding that Damian Crest had neutralized nervousness from his operating system so long ago that the mechanism no longer existed. He looked like a man at a meeting. A serious meeting, the kind that had consequences, but a meeting. She wondered if everything felt like a meeting to him. She wondered if that was lonely.

She signed her name forty-three times. She counted, because counting was something to do other than think about what she was doing.

Aria Malone. And again. Aria Malone. And again. The loops in her handwriting getting slightly less even toward the end, which she told herself was because her hand was tired and not because something in her chest was very quietly rearranging itself.

When the last page was done, the Crest Industries lawyer said, 'We'll have the funds transferred by end of business today,' and Aria said 'Thank you' in a voice that was steady, which she was proud of.

Damian signed his pages with the same economy of movement he did everything — no pausing, no looking back, a signature that was legible and contained and revealed absolutely nothing. Then he stood, and Aria stood, and they shook hands with the lawyer and the assistant, and she noticed that Damian's handshake with her, when they were signing the final acknowledgment page together, was the firmest she'd felt from him but also the briefest. Like he was being correct but not comfortable.

She was beginning to understand that the difference between those two things was where everything interesting about him lived.

— ✦ —

In the elevator afterward, on the way down, he said: 'My driver will take you to the apartment this evening. The building manager has your key.'

'Tonight?'

'The first board appearance is in six days. It would look unusual if we were still living separately.'

She had known this was coming. She had read page eleven of the contract three times: Separate sleeping quarters to be maintained at all times during cohabitation. She had known it as an abstract fact, the way you know that a flight departs at six a.m. when you book it months in advance, and it had felt manageable.

And then 'tonight' landed in the conversation and it stopped being abstract.

'Okay,' she said.

'Your room is the third door on the left in the east wing. The suite has a private bathroom and a sitting area. I had the staff clear it of furniture so you can arrange it however you want.' He looked at the elevator doors as they descended. 'My assistant can arrange delivery from wherever you need, today or tomorrow.'

'I don't have much,' she said. 'Most of what I own fits in about six boxes.'

She heard herself say it and felt the small dull shame of it. Six boxes. Twenty-six years old.

'That's fine,' he said, without inflection — not unkind, not performatively accepting, just: that is a fact, and it is fine. And then, after a pause that was slightly longer than his usual pauses: 'You can decorate your room however you want.'

It was such a small thing. Such a weirdly specific, weirdly human thing to add.

She looked at him. He was still looking at the elevator doors. His profile was exactly as composed as the rest of him.

'Thanks,' she managed.

The lobby. The doors opened. He stepped out and a car materialised from somewhere — that was the only word for it — and a door was opened by a driver she hadn't seen arrive, and Damian looked back at her once from the pavement.

'Aria.'

First name. First time. She felt it somewhere around her sternum — a quick, specific pressure, warm and slightly alarming, that she was absolutely not going to examine.

'The schedule for the board appearance will be sent to your phone this evening,' he said. 'Dinner at seven is usually the household default. You are not required to attend.'

'I understand,' she said.

He looked at her for one more moment. Something behind his eyes — something she couldn't name, some small movement of the interior landscape he kept so rigorously private.

'You're going to be fine,' he said.

Not warmly. Not gently. Not in the voice you'd use to reassure someone who was frightened. In a voice that stated a conclusion that had already been reached, based on available evidence.

Then he got in the car and the door closed and he was gone.

She stood on the pavement while the midday foot traffic moved around her — people with places to be, people who had