Chapter 5
1361 Words
My phone rang at half past two and I didn't recognize the number.
I almost didn't answer. I was between patients and I had exactly seven minutes before I needed to be in room four and unknown numbers during a shift were usually either telemarketers or bad news and I had met my bad news quota for the week already.
I answered anyway.
"Miss Sinclair."
I knew the voice immediately. Low, unhurried, the kind of voice that assumed it would be listened to without needing to announce itself. I stepped away from the nurses' station and lowered my own voice.
"How did you get this number," I said.
"Charles is efficient," he said, which was not an answer and he knew it.
"I'm at work," I said.
"I know. This won't take long." A brief pause. "My mother knows about you."
I stopped walking.
"We signed the contract four hours ago," I said.
"She called about the Voss arrangement. I needed to shut the conversation down quickly."
"So you told her about me without warning me first."
"Yes."
The honesty was almost impressive. No softening, no justification layered over the top of it. Just yes, the way someone confirms a fact about the weather.
"You told me I would have time to prepare," I said.
"I told you there would be family events. I didn't specify a timeline."
"Damien." It was the first time I had used his name and it came out sharper than I intended, which was probably appropriate. "When is the event."
"Saturday."
"That is four days away."
"I'm aware."
I pressed my fingers to the bridge of my nose and breathed through the particular kind of frustration that had no clean outlet. I was standing in a hospital corridor in scrubs with a patient waiting and a man who had just casually rearranged my life was on the other end of my phone treating it like a scheduling inconvenience.
"What does Saturday involve," I said.
"Dinner at my parents' house. My mother, my father, my brother Marcus. Formal but not black tie. Seven o'clock. Charles will send a car."
"I don't need a car."
"The address is in a gated area. The car is easier."
"I need to know what to expect from your parents before I walk into that house," I said. "I am not going in blind."
A pause. Longer than his usual ones.
"I'll come to you tomorrow evening," he said. "We can go over what you need to know."
"I finish at six."
"I'll be there at seven. Text Charles your address."
He ended the call before I could respond and I stood in the corridor for a moment looking at the phone in my hand and thinking about the fact that I had agreed to let this man come to my apartment. My apartment with the secondhand couch and the stack of bills on the counter and Lena's fabric samples spread across every available surface.
I texted Charles the address because the alternative was walking into Saturday unprepared and unprepared was something I could not afford.
---
I told Grace that evening because I couldn't not tell Grace. She was the only person I trusted with anything that mattered and keeping it from her would have required a level of deception I didn't have the energy for.
We sat in the break room at the end of our shift and I told her everything. The contract, the debt, the lobby, the signed papers, the phone call this afternoon. All of it in the flat, factual way I delivered difficult information, without drama, just the sequence of events laid out clearly.
Grace was quiet for the entire thing which was unusual because Grace was quiet for almost nothing.
When I finished she looked at me for a long moment and said, "Aria. You sold three months of your life to a billionaire."
"I solved a financial problem," I said.
"You are going to his parents' house on Saturday."
"As part of an agreement that clears a debt that was going to cost me my job."
"Has the money actually cleared?" she said.
I had checked my Meridian account at five o'clock. The balance had read zero. I had stared at that number for a full minute before I believed it.
"Yes," I said.
Grace leaned back in her chair and looked at the ceiling and let out a long breath. "Okay," she said. "Okay. So it's done. You're doing this."
"I'm doing this."
"And you feel nothing about it."
"I feel relieved," I said. "The debt is gone. The board review next Friday is no longer a crisis. I can breathe for the first time in fourteen months. That's what I feel."
She looked at me the way she looked at patients who were describing symptoms she didn't fully believe. "And the man himself. You feel nothing about him."
"He's a means to an end."
"He's coming to your apartment tomorrow."
"To prepare me for a family dinner. It's practical."
"Aria."
"Grace."
She shook her head and stood up and grabbed her bag and stopped at the door. "I just want to say, for the record, that I have known you for six years and I have never once seen you make a purely practical decision that didn't have something real underneath it. So when this gets complicated, and it will get complicated, I need you to not act surprised."
"It won't get complicated," I said.
She gave me a look that said everything she had decided not to put into words and walked out.
---
Damien arrived at seven the next evening exactly. Not five past. Not three past. Seven, as if his watch and his intentions were the same thing.
I opened the door and he stood there in a dark jacket and no tie, which was the most casual I had seen him and it was still more put together than most people managed for formal occasions. He looked past me briefly at the apartment behind me and I watched him take it in and register it without reacting, which I appreciated more than I expected to.
He came in and sat on the couch and I sat across from him and he spent the next forty minutes telling me everything I needed to know about his family. His mother's tells when she was suspicious. His father's preferred conversation topics and the ones that were traps. Marcus and how to read him. The unspoken rules of a Blackwell dinner table that nobody ever said out loud but everyone was expected to know.
I listened to all of it and asked questions where I needed to and took nothing for granted. By the time he finished I felt as prepared as someone could feel walking into a situation they had never encountered before.
He stood to leave and I walked him to the door and he paused in the doorway and looked at me with an expression I was starting to recognize as the one he wore when he was about to say something he had been holding back.
"My mother is going to ask how we met," he said.
"We'll say through the hospital," I said. "It's true enough."
He nodded slowly. Then, "She's going to try to find the gap between your story and mine. She's good at it."
"So am I," I said.
He looked at me for a moment and something moved through his expression that I didn't have a name for and wasn't sure I wanted one.
"One more thing," he said quietly. "My mother called again this morning. She did some checking of her own after our call yesterday." He paused. "She knows your full name, Aria. And when I heard her say it, something in her voice was off in a way I can't explain yet."
I felt the first real thread of unease move through me.
"What does that mean?" I said.
He looked at me with those unreadable grey eyes and said, "I don't know yet. But I think Saturday is going to be more complicated than either of us planned.”
- Writer
