COLD TERMS

EPISODE TWO CONTINUE

One covered for the duration. At the end of twelve months, we divorce quietly and you walk away with your finances rebuilt and a non-disclosure agreement already filed.'

Three hundred thousand dollars.

She heard her own pulse in her ears. Not the racing kind — the slow, weighty kind, like her body was counting out the significance of it one beat at a time.

'And what do you get?' she asked, because she needed to say something and this was the most practical question available.

'The acquisition.' He sat back in his chair with the ease of someone who had never once been uncomfortable in a chair. 'Twelve months of my grandmother believing I'm a man who chose a partner. A performance. Nothing more.'

She finally reached for the folder.

It was heavy. Of course it was heavy.

She set it in her lap, looked at the cover — no letterhead, just a typed title: ARRANGEMENT AGREEMENT — and felt the strange doubled reality of sitting in this office on a Thursday morning holding a contract for a pretend marriage with the most contained person she had ever met in her life.

'I need to read it,' she said.

'Of course.' He said it as if this were the obvious and only reasonable response.

She looked up at him. He was watching her with that same quality of attention — complete, unnerving, and entirely without the awkward social softening she was used to from other people. Most people, when caught staring, looked away. He did not look away.

'I'll need to take it home,' she said.

'Of course.'

'And I'll have questions.'

'I would expect nothing else.'

She stood. He stood too, with that same automatic courtesy that had probably been trained into him before he was old enough to understand what courtesy was for. She tucked the folder under her arm.

'How did you find me?' she asked, at the door. Not to challenge him — she was genuinely curious, in the way you're curious about the specific mechanism of something that's happened to you whether you wanted it to or not.

'Carefully,' he said.

She looked at him for a moment. He looked back.

She left.

In the elevator, she pressed the lobby button and watched the doors close and let herself, for the first time since she'd walked in, take a breath that was less than composed.

Three hundred thousand dollars.

Her mother's debt, cleared. Her certification, renewed. A year of breathing room.

She held the folder against her chest and thought about the way he'd said: 'I would expect nothing else.' Not 'of course' or 'fine' or 'go ahead' — but 'I would expect nothing else.' Like her having questions was not an inconvenience but an inevitability. Like she had already told him something about herself and he had already filed it.

She wasn't sure if that was comforting or terrifying.

Probably both.