Signatures
553 Words
The office was on the thirty-fourth floor and had floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides.
Mia stood at one of them while Adrian's lawyers arranged papers on the conference table behind her. Thirty-four floors down, the city was doing its morning thing — delivery trucks, coffee queues, people with their heads down and somewhere to be. She'd been one of them two days ago. Technically she still was. The paper bag from the facility was sitting in the hotel room she'd checked out of this morning, the dented quarter still in it.
"Ms. Calloway." One of the lawyers — young, careful, the kind of careful that came from being burned once — gestured toward the table. "Whenever you're ready."
She turned from the window and sat down.
The contract was forty-three pages. She read all of it. The lawyers exchanged a look somewhere around page twelve, and she didn't acknowledge it.
The terms were what Adrian had said: two hundred million won — no, two million dollars, she kept doing that — in six installments over twelve months. Access to a household account with a monthly ceiling she could renegotiate. Separate residences within the same building. Public appearances at a minimum of two events per month, negotiable beyond that. A mutual non-disclosure that ran ten years post-contract.
Page thirty-one had a clause about social media. Page thirty-six had one about travel notifications.
Page forty-one had a line she read twice: In the event that either party develops a genuine romantic attachment during the term of this agreement, both parties agree to address same in good faith.
She almost laughed. Someone had made a lawyer write that sentence.
She initialed each page, signed the last one, and put the pen down.
"I need one thing that's not in here," she said.
The careful lawyer looked up.
"There's a charity gala in two weeks. The Calloway Foundation annual event." She kept her voice level. "I'd like that to be our first public appearance."
A pause. Adrian, who had been standing near the window in the position she'd apparently taken from him, turned around.
"The Calloway Foundation," he said.
"They do good work." She met his eyes. "I've followed them for years."
He held her gaze for three seconds. Then he looked at his lawyer. "Add it."
She walked out of the Blackwell building at noon with a copy of the contract in a manila envelope and two million dollars pending in an account that currently held forty-one dollars and change.
She bought a sandwich from a cart on the corner and sat on the steps of the building across the street and ate it and thought about Sophia.
Sophia, who had stood in that courtroom and cried — actually cried, the performance of it was almost impressive — and told the jury that she'd only wanted to protect the company from her unstable stepsister. Sophia, who was now running Calloway Group's charitable arm with the confidence of someone who had completely forgotten they'd stolen it.
The Calloway Foundation gala would have two hundred people in it. Sophia would be at the center of all of them.
And Mia was about to walk in on the arm of a Blackwell.
She finished her sandwich. Crumpled the wrapper. Stood up.
She had two weeks, and things to prepare.
- Writer
