PAID IN VOWS

CHAPTER FIVE

Sofia called it the worst idea I had ever had, twice, and both times I told her she was probably right and did not change my mind. There is a particular kind of decision that stops being a decision somewhere in the making of it, that becomes instead a fact you are simply waiting to say out loud, and by Thursday night, sitting on my bathroom floor again with my laptop open to nothing in particular, I understood that I had already decided, for reasons that were no longer entirely about the money.

I thought about my father a great deal that week. I understood him better that week than I had in years, and I resented him for it in equal measure.

I visited my mother again on Thursday and told her, in the gentlest terms I could manage, that I had found a way to handle the debt, that it would not touch the house, that she did not need to worry about any of it. I did not tell her what handling it actually meant, or that some reckless, unexamined part of me was no longer entirely dreading the handling of it.

She hugged me for a long time before I left, and told me my father would be proud of how I was handling everything.

I called Dante's office on Friday morning, before I had even had coffee, because I understood that if I waited any longer I would talk myself out of it through sheer force of overthinking, the same way I had talked myself out of a dozen smaller decisions in my life that had turned out, in hindsight, to have been correct instincts I ignored out of caution.

"Yes," I said, when Claudia put me through. No greeting, no preamble. "I'll do it."

There was a pause on the line, and when Dante spoke his voice held something I had not expected to hear in it. Not triumph, exactly. Something closer to relief, warmer than the word should have allowed.

"Good," he said. "My father will want to meet you properly before we announce anything. Dinner, Sunday. Wear something that isn't a suit. He finds women who dress like lawyers unsettling."

"I am, functionally, the closest thing my father's company has to a lawyer right now."

"I'm aware. I'd still recommend a dress."

I laughed before I could stop myself, a short, surprised sound that had nothing to do with the situation being funny and everything to do with the sheer absurdity of being given fashion advice by a man I was apparently about to marry, and the absurdity of how much, underneath it, I had simply wanted to hear his voice do that thing again, go warm and unguarded for half a sentence before the composure came back down over it.

"Fine," I said. "A dress."

"I'll send a car Sunday at six."

"I have a car."

"I know," he said. "I'd still recommend mine."

I agreed, mostly because arguing about a car felt like a battle not worth the energy I did not have, and when we hung up, I stood in my kitchen for a long moment afterward, aware that I had just agreed to marry a man for the sake of a debt, and aware, underneath that, of a second, more private agreement I had made with myself somewhere over the course of this call, that I was not actually dreading Sunday the way a woman in my position reasonably should have been.

I told Sofia that night, over the phone, because I could not bring myself to say it in person and watch her face do whatever it was going to do.

"I'm not going to pretend I think this is a good idea," she said finally. "But I love you, and if you're doing this, then I am going to be the person who makes sure you don't disappear into it. Understood?"

"Understood."

"And if there's even a chance you're doing this partly because of him, specifically, I want you to be honest with yourself about that, before you're in too deep to separate the debt from the feeling."

"It's not just that," I said, and meant it, even as some truer, smaller voice underneath the sentence admitted that it was not entirely not that either, and that I had no idea yet what to do with a feeling that had arrived this early and this inconveniently, attached to a man I had met exactly once, at my own father's funeral, over the subject of four hundred thousand dollars.

Sofia was quiet on the other end of the line for a long moment, and when she spoke again, her voice had lost some of its earlier sharpness. "I still don't fully trust this," she said. "I want you to know that. But I trust you, and I trust that you're paying attention to the right things, even the inconvenient ones. That's more than I can say for most of the relationships I've watched you navigate before this one."

"That's a backhanded vote of confidence if I've ever heard one."

"It's the only kind I've got available right now," she said, something warm underneath the dry humor. "Just promise me you'll keep being honest with yourself about why you're doing this, even the parts that don't make you look good. I'd rather you walk into this with your eyes open than pretend, even to me, that it's only ever been about the money."

I promised her I would, and spent the rest of that evening doing exactly that, sitting alone with the full, uncomfortable truth of it, that I was marrying a man to save my family from a debt he represented, and that somewhere in the three short weeks since the funeral, I had also started, quietly, dangerously, to want him for reasons that had nothing to do with any of it.

I thought about calling him that night, just to hear his voice again before Sunday, and talked myself out of it twice before finally setting the phone down for good. There would be time enough for that, I told myself, once the dinner with his father was behind us, once the shape of this arrangement had settled into something I understood well enough to trust. I did not yet know how quickly that settling was going to happen, or how little either of us would end up being able to wait for it.

I spent Saturday doing the things I always did when I needed to feel like myself again, running the loop around the reservoir near my apartment, calling my mother to check on her without mentioning any of what was actually happening, going through the last of my father's paperwork in search of anything I might have missed, some smaller debt, some other complication waiting to surface at the worst possible moment.

I found nothing else. Just the one debt, the one name, the one number that had rearranged the entire shape of my life in the space of a single conversation at a funeral, and underneath it, quietly, the one man who had rearranged something else in me that I had not been expecting at all. There was something almost merciful in the fact that whatever else my father had kept from me, it had at least been contained to a single, catastrophic secret rather than a dozen smaller ones waiting to surface over years.

Sunday arrived faster than I wanted it to, and I stood in front of my closet for nearly an hour, trying on and discarding three different versions of a dress before finally settling on the green one, the one I would end up wearing to meet Salvatore Moretti two days later, and I found myself, absurdly, nervous in a way that had nothing to do with the actual stakes of a dinner and everything to do with the strange, unfamiliar feeling of wanting a man I barely knew to think well of me, for reasons that had stopped, somewhere in the last few days, being purely strategic.

I called Sofia one more time before the car arrived, mostly for the simple comfort of hearing a familiar voice before walking into an unfamiliar house full of unfamiliar expectations.

"You're going to be fine," she said, with more confidence than either of us fully believed yet. "You've negotiated with worse men than his father for worse stakes than dinner. Just don't let them see you flinch, whatever they say."

"I don't flinch."

"I know," she said, something warm and proud slipping into her voice despite the circumstances. "That's exactly why I'm not actually worried about tonight, even though I probably should be, given everything else you've told me."

Her certainty, however manufactured for my benefit, steadied something in me that had been quietly shaking since I first opened my closet that afternoon, and by the time Sal's car pulled up outside my building, I felt, if not entirely calm, at least ready to walk into that house as exactly the version of myself who had already survived the worst week of her life and come out the other side still standing, and maybe, quietly, a little bit hopeful about what waited on the other side of it too.