Paper Vows, real Ashes

Strike Nine

Six weeks earlier

"Cross out clause nine."

The lawyer's pen stopped moving. Damien Calder didn't look up from the folder in front of him.

"Miss Voss…"

"I heard her," Damien said. "Cross it out."

Elara kept her hands folded on the table so they wouldn't shake. "Clause nine says the company retains rights to my likeness for promotional material. I'm not signing that."

"It's standard for public appearances."

"Then make it non-standard. I'm not spending the next year on a billboard I didn't agree to."

The lawyer, a thin man named Prescott, looked between them like he was watching a tennis match he hadn't been told the rules to. Damien finally looked up. His eyes were calm but that made Elara distrust him more, not less.

"You're negotiating a fake marriage like it's a hostile takeover," he said.

"I'm negotiating the only leverage I have. I intend to use it."

Something moved behind his expression,not quite a smile. "Fine. Strike nine."

Prescott struck it. Elara exhaled through her nose and didn't let it show on her face.

"What else," Damien said.

"Clause fourteen. Medical coverage for my brother starts the day I sign, not the day the marriage is finalized."

"That's two weeks earlier than the contract allows."

"Then the contract's wrong."

"It's not wrong. It's cautious. People change their minds in two weeks."

"I won't."

"Everyone says that."

"I'm not everyone. I have a brother in a hospital bed racking up debt by the hour, so forgive me if I don't have the luxury of being cautious with you."

The room went quiet leaving only the hum of the air conditioner. Damien studied her the way she imagined he studied quarterly reports, for the number that didn't add up.

"Fourteen stands as amended," he said finally. "Coverage starts on signing."

Prescott made the note. Elara let herself breathe again.

"Anything else?" Damien asked.

She almost said no. Then: "The no-emotional-attachment clause."

"What about it?"

"It's vague. Attachment to what … you? The house? The idea of not being broke for the first time in six years?"

"Attachment to me," he said. "Specifically."

"You think I'm going to fall for you."

"I think people confuse proximity for feeling. I'd rather it be in writing that we both know the difference."

"You could just trust me not to be an idiot."

"I don't trust anyone I haven't put in writing."

She almost laughed "Fine. Leave it. I won't be attached to you if you promise not to be insufferable for a full year."

"I make no promises."

"Then we're even, because neither do I."

Prescott cleared his throat like he wanted the room to remember he existed. "If we're finished with the amendments…"

"We're not finished," Damien said, still looking at Elara. "One more."

He nodded at Prescott, who flipped to a page near the back and turned the document around so the clause faced her. She read it twice before it landed.

*No public emotional entanglement.*

"That's not what we agreed to," she said. "We agreed on no emotional attachment. Full stop."

"I revised it."

"When?"

"Ten minutes ago."

"Without telling me?”

"I'm telling you now."

"That's not the same as telling me before I read past it."

"You didn't read past it. You caught it." Something in his voice suggested this was, to him, a point in her favor. "The distinction matters. Public appearances require a convincing marriage. A convincing marriage requires warmth in front of people who are paid to notice when there isn't any."

"So I'm allowed to feel things. I'm just not allowed to be seen feeling them."

"Correct."

"That's insane."

"It's optics."

She stared at the page, at the two words that had quietly rewritten the entire year she was about to sign away. Something about it made her stomach tighten in a way clause nine hadn't. She couldn't have said why yet, only that some instinct she trusted more than her own reasoning was telling her this particular clause wasn't really about optics at all.

"Fine," she said, because she needed the money more than she needed to win this particular fight. "Leave it."

"You're sure."

"Are you asking because you want me to change my mind, or because you're required to ask?"

"The second one."

"Then yes. I'm sure."

Prescott slid the final copy across the table with a pen resting on top of it, and for a moment nobody moved. Elara looked at the signature line. Then at Damien, who wasn't looking at the contract at all, he was looking at her, in the specific way people look at something they're trying to solve rather than something they're trying to sell.

"Say something," she said. "You've got a face like you're about to."

"I was going to ask if you're sure for a third reason."

"Which is?"

"That you don't actually know what you're walking into."

"I know exactly what I'm walking into. A house, a role, a paycheck, and an exit door in three hundred and sixty-five days."

"That's the contract," he said. "It's not the house."

Before she could ask what that meant, she picked up the pen instead, because whatever answer he had wasn't going to change the number in her brother's account, and that was the only number that mattered this morning. She signed her name at the bottom of the page in the same handwriting she used for everything and set the pen down with more finality than the gesture probably deserved.

"Congratulations," Prescott said, in the flat voice of a man who had said the word too many times to mean it. "You're married as of Thursday's filing."

"Married," Elara repeated. "That's a strange word for this."

"It's the only word the county recognizes."

Damien reached for the folder to close it, and that was when the door opened without a knock.

The woman who walked in wore cream-colored silk like it was armor, and she took in the room: Elara, the pen, the open contract in under two seconds.

"You didn't tell me you'd already chosen her," she said to Damien, not to Elara, as if Elara were a line item rather than a person sitting three feet away with a pen still warm in her hand.

Damien's jaw moved once before he answered. "Mother. We're in the middle of something."

"Clearly." Margaret Calder's eyes finally landed on Elara, cool and assessing. "I didn't expect you to move this fast, Damien. Or this quietly."

"It's not a secret."

"It should have been mine to know first."

"It's my marriage."

"It's my house she's about to move into," Margaret said. Then, to Elara, with a smile that didn't touch anything below her cheekbones: "You'll forgive me for being surprised. I've been waiting a very long time for this particular piece to fall into place."

Elara's pen was already down, the signature already dry, but something in that sentence made her hand twitch toward it anyway, an instinct to pick it back up, to unsign what she'd just signed, though she couldn't have said why.

"I'm sorry," she said. "This piece?"

Margaret's smile didn't move, but something behind it recalculated, fast enough that Elara almost missed it. "This arrangement," she corrected, too smoothly. "I meant the arrangement."

Elara looked at Damien. Damien wasn't looking at his mother anymore. He was looking at the folder Prescott had already begun sliding back into his briefcase, the one with Elara's name typed across the tab, thicker than a marriage contract had any reason to be, and dated, she was almost certain, though she hadn't had time to check, well before the ad she'd answered had ever gone live.