This Time I Choose Me

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

NORA

She came back ten minutes later with a slip of paper, folded once, and pressed it into my hand without a word. I didn't open it until I was back outside, sitting in my father's car with the engine off, my heart going too fast for someone who had only had a conversation.

A phone number. No name attached, but I didn't need one.

I called before I could talk myself out of it.

It rang four times before a man picked up, his voice flat, clipped, the voice of someone who answered unknown numbers rarely and never happily.

"Who is this?"

"My name is Nora Smith," I said. "I need to speak with you about your mother. I know her name is connected to Adrian Rayne, and I know that's not supposed to be public knowledge. I'm not here to hurt anyone. I'm here because I think we might be able to help each other."

Silence on the other end, long enough that I thought he might have hung up.

"How did you get this number," he said finally, each word measured out like he was deciding whether to be angry or careful.

"I have my reasons. I'd rather explain them in person."

"I don't know you."

"No," I said. "But you're going to want to."

Another silence, shorter this time. "There's a coffee place two streets from the home. Twenty minutes. Come alone."

He hung up before I could answer.

I sat in the car staring at the phone for a second, my own nerve catching up to me late, the way it always did. I had less than four hours before I was supposed to be standing in my parents' living room getting my hair pinned up for a wedding that hadn't happened yet in this life but had already ruined me once in another. I didn't have time to sit and think too hard about what I was doing. I just had to do it.

The coffee place was small, tucked between a dry cleaner and a shuttered bookstore, the kind of place that survived on regulars and nobody else. I got there first and picked a table in the back, away from the window, and I waited with my hands wrapped around a cup I didn't drink.

He walked in twelve minutes later. I knew him before he said a word, though I'd never seen his face before in either life. He had the look of someone built for careful rooms, dark coat, nothing flashy, the kind of quiet expensive that doesn't announce itself. He was younger than I expected, maybe early thirties, sharp-jawed, and his eyes found me across the room before I even lifted my hand.

He sat down across from me without offering his name.

"Adrian Rayne," I said anyway, because I already knew, and because I wanted him to understand right away that I wasn't guessing.

Something flickered behind his eyes, gone fast, the same way the receptionist's fear had come and gone. "You have thirty seconds to explain how you know that name before I walk out of here."

"Your mother is in that home under a different last name," I said. "Paid for privately, quietly, the kind of arrangement built to keep her separate from you on paper. I don't know why yet. But I know it's connected to something you've spent a long time trying to keep buried, and I know that whatever happened to your family wasn't an accident."

His jaw tightened. "You don't know anything."

"I know enough to find you in under a day," I said. "Which means other people could find you too, if they wanted to badly enough. I'm not one of them. I'm here because I think the people who hurt your family are the same people who are about to hurt mine, and I would rather work with you than watch you find out the hard way that I already knew and said nothing."

He studied me for a long moment, the kind of look that made me feel like he was pricing something, deciding what I was worth and what I might cost him.

"Who are you," he said finally, "and what do you actually want."

"I want to marry you," I said.

For a second he just looked at me, and then he laughed, short and sharp, more disbelief than humor. "You're joking."

"I'm not."

"You're sitting in front of a man you've known for twelve minutes and telling him you want to marry him."

"Yes."

"You're insane."

"Maybe," I said. "But I'm not wrong about what I know, and I'm not wrong about what I'm offering. I can help you take down the people who did this to your family. I have access, money, a name that opens doors yours might not, at least not yet. In exchange, I need a husband today, before three o'clock, someone with no connection to the people I'm trying to protect myself from. Someone they won't see coming."

He stopped laughing.

I watched it happen, the shift, the moment he decided I wasn't joking and wasn't stupid either, just something he hadn't accounted for yet. His eyes narrowed, calculating now instead of dismissive.

"What kind of woman signs her own wedding away to a stranger she met an hour ago," he said, quieter now, the mockery gone out of his voice.

"The kind who already knows what it costs to marry someone she thought she could trust," I said. "I'd rather hand my life to someone with nothing to gain from lying to me than to someone I already love who's been lying the whole time."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I'm giving you today."

He leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, studying me the way you study a puzzle piece that doesn't match the picture on the box but somehow still seems to fit. "You're not explaining half of what's going on with you."

"No," I agreed. "I'm not. Not yet. You're going to have to decide if you trust me enough to move forward without every answer, the same way I'm deciding to trust you."

"I don't trust anyone."