The Moretti Contract

No Other Way

The offer came on a Thursday, delivered not by Dante himself but by a woman in a gray suit who introduced herself only as Ms. Palmer and set a folder on Richard Voss's desk like she was serving a subpoena.

Elena read it twice before she let herself believe what it said. The debt of seven million four hundred thousand dollars, forgiven in full, in exchange for a legal marriage between Elena Marie Voss and Dante Salvatore Moretti, minimum term eighteen months, terms of dissolution to be negotiated at the conclusion of that period. There was language about public appearances, about confidentiality, about conduct, four pages of clauses written by someone who had clearly done this kind of paperwork before, which was its own kind of horrifying to consider.

"Absolutely not," Elena said, before her father had gotten past the second page. "No. This isn't, people don't do this, this isn't a real thing that happens."

"Elena."

"He wants to buy me, Dad. He's trying to buy me the way he'd buy a building." Her hands were shaking, she noticed, holding the folder like it might combust. "You cannot possibly be considering this."

Her father was quiet for a long moment, and when he finally spoke his voice had none of its usual bluster in it, none of the confidence he'd spent thirty years performing for clients and contractors and a daughter who had grown up believing her father could fix anything. "I already went to see him. Yesterday, after the men came. I told him I wouldn't allow it, that there had to be another way, a payment plan, anything."

"And?"

"And he said the offer expires Friday at five o'clock, and after that he takes the building and the house and whatever else it takes to make the balance whole, and there won't be another offer." He looked up at her, and the fear in his face was the kind she had never seen there before, not when the company nearly folded during the recession, not when her mother got sick, not ever. "Elena, I have looked at this from every angle I know how to look at it from. I don't have another way. If I had another way I would take it, I swear to you I would take it before I let you do this."

"So don't let me. Say no. We'll figure it out, we'll sell the house, we'll—"

"The house isn't worth a tenth of what's owed. Neither is the firm. Neither is anything I have, all of it together, and that's before whatever penalties come with defaulting on a debt to a family like that one." He put his head in his hands, and Elena watched her father, who had never once in her life let her see him cry, come apart quietly across his own desk. "I would rather lose everything than lose you. But this isn't losing you. It's eighteen months. It's a contract. People survive contracts."

Elena sat down across from him because her legs had stopped being entirely reliable, and stared at the folder, at the clean legal language that somehow made the whole thing worse instead of better, like professionalism was supposed to be a comfort. "You don't know that. You don't know what he's like, what that world is like, you're asking me to walk into it because you're afraid."

"I'm asking because I don't have anything else to offer you," her father said, and that, more than anything, was what broke something loose in Elena's chest. Not the debt. Not the threat. The sight of her father, who had spent her whole life being the person who solved things, sitting there with absolutely nothing left to solve this with.

She thought about the four minutes Dante Moretti had spent in this office, the way he'd looked at her father with something that was almost regret buried under all that patience, the way he'd looked at her like he was doing math. She thought about the way he hadn't raised his voice once, hadn't needed to, and how that had frightened her more than shouting would have.

"Eighteen months," she said finally, testing the words in her mouth like they belonged to someone else.

"Elena—"

"Don't. Don't try to talk me out of it now that I'm saying it." She closed the folder, because she couldn't keep looking at the clauses, at the version of her future spelled out in someone else's careful legal handwriting. "I'll do it. I'll marry him, I'll keep the company running for you, and in eighteen months this is over and none of us ever has to think about the Moretti family again."

Her father reached across the desk and took her hand, and his was shaking worse than hers. "I don't deserve this."

"No," she agreed, not unkindly, because it was true and there was no point pretending otherwise. "You don't. But I'm doing it anyway, so let's not waste the next two days arguing about whether I should."

She sat with the list for a long time after she finished writing it, a short, strange inventory of practical things, cancel the dentist appointment, ask Ola to cover the Hendricks project, figure out what a person was supposed to pack for a marriage that came with a folder of rules attached, and thought that if anyone had told her a month ago this was how her spring would go, she would have laughed them out of the office.

She called the number on Ms. Palmer's card that evening, and the woman who answered sounded entirely unsurprised, like the outcome had never actually been in question, like Elena's two days of horror and her father's tears had simply been a formality the paperwork required before it could proceed. A car would come Saturday morning to take her to see Mr. Moretti. There were things to discuss.

Elena hung up the phone and sat alone in her childhood bedroom, in the house that would apparently now stay her father's house, and looked around at the things that had made up her whole life before this week, the desk where she'd done homework, the window that still stuck a little in summer, the shelf of paperbacks she'd never quite gotten around to donating even after she moved out and back in twice over the years. None of it had prepared her for a folder full of clauses, a debt with someone else's name attached to a fortune, a man who could end her family's life with a signature and had chosen, instead, to offer marriage like it was a reasonable alternative.

She thought about calling a friend, someone from architecture school, someone who would be appropriately horrified and tell her she didn't have to do this, that there was always another way. She didn't call anyone. Some part of her understood already that there was no explaining this to someone standing outside of it, that the moment she said the words mafia and marriage and my father in the same sentence, she would become a story instead of a person, and she wasn't ready yet to be anyone's story.

She cried for exactly ten minutes before she made herself stop, because crying wasn't going to be useful for whatever came next, and she suspected she was going to need everything useful she had. Then she got up, washed her face, and began, methodically, the way she approached every problem she couldn't out think, to make a list of everything she needed to do before Saturday.