The Devil's Bargain

Chapter Six: Fine Print

Maren didn't go back to the penthouse that night.

She rode the subway instead, the way she used to, letting the rattle of the train shake something loose in her chest. She got off in Queens, at a stop she hadn't used in two years, and walked eleven blocks to her mother's apartment with her coat pulled tight and her phone buzzing in her pocket every ninety seconds.

Alexander Voss. Alexander Voss. Alexander Voss.

She turned it face-down and kept walking.

Her mother's building still smelled the way it always had, like boiled cabbage and radiator dust, and the stairwell light on the third floor still flickered like it was sending a message in code. Maren let herself in with the key she'd never given back and found her mother, Ruth, asleep in the recliner in front of a muted television, an oxygen tube looped under her nose, a paperback splayed open on her chest.

Maren stood in the doorway for a long time.

"You're just going to stand there and breathe at me?" Ruth's eyes hadn't opened. "I can feel it. You've been doing it since you were four."

"I didn't want to wake you."

"I wasn't asleep. I was resting my eyes." Ruth opened them, and they were the same grey-green as Maren's, only more tired, more knowing. "You look like someone ran over your dog."

"I don't have a dog."

"Then it's worse than a dog." Ruth patted the arm of the sofa beside her. "Sit. Tell me."

So Maren sat, and told her the truth.

Not the truth she'd been telling Eleanor Voss over dinner, the polished, edited, mostly-honest version. The real one. The contract. The two million dollars. The elevator. The file on her desk that Alexander had kept and never mentioned, thick with the worst year of her life.

When she finished, Ruth was quiet for a while.

"Well," she said at last. "That's a lot of money."

"Mom."

"I'm not saying it's the right thing, I'm saying it's a lot of money." Ruth's mouth twitched. "Also I'm saying you're an i***t. Not for signing it. For thinking you'd get out of it with your heart in the same place you left it."

"I didn't think that."

"Yes, you did. You always think you can do the hard thing without it costing you anything." Ruth reached out, and her hand, thin, spotted, trembling only a little, closed over Maren's. "That's what you got from me. I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault."

"It's a little bit my fault." Ruth squeezed. "Now tell me the important part. Do you love him?"

Maren opened her mouth to say no, to say of course not, it's been five weeks, to say any of the reasonable things a reasonable person would say. What came out was a broken little sound that surprised them both.

"Ah," Ruth said gently. "There it is."

Alexander was sitting on the stoop when she came down the next morning.

He looked terrible. He was still wearing yesterday's shirt, the collar undone, dark stubble shadowing his jaw, and the cold had turned his hands red where they hung between his knees. A black car idled at the curb with a driver who was pointedly not watching.

"How long have you been here?" Maren asked.

"Since about four." He stood, slowly, like his knees had locked. "I tracked your phone. I know that's a violation. I'm sorry. I'm apologizing in advance for the seven other violations I'm about to commit."

"Alexander"

"Let me say it." He held up a hand, and it wasn't the confident gesture of a man giving orders; it was the shaky, palm-out plea of someone hoping not to get cut off. "I need to say it all at once, or I'll lose my nerve and go back to being the person who hires people and doesn't tell them what he knows."

She folded her arms against the cold. "You have until my train comes."

"I did have you investigated." His voice was hoarse. "I do it to everyone. Vendors, board members, my own assistant. I didn't do it to hurt you, and I didn't do it to find your weak spots. I did it because when you grow up in my family, the only people who love you are the ones with something to gain. I couldn't hand my company to a stranger without knowing who she was."

"And who was I?"

"Someone who'd been drowning for a long time and never once asked anyone for help." He said it quietly. "I read that file and I wanted to fix it. That was the whole thing. I wanted to fix it before I even met you. And then I met you, and you told me my grandmother's reference letter wasn't a legitimate reason to question your résumé, and I realized I didn't want to buy you a solution. I wanted to know you."

Maren looked away. A garbage truck ground past at the end of the block, somehow the loudest thing in Queens.

"I should have told you," he said. "I should have put the file on the table, first day, and let you decide whether to stay. I didn't, because I was afraid you'd leave, and I've never been afraid of anyone leaving before, and it made me stupid."

"Preston said you always do this."

"Preston says a great many things when he's cornered." Alexander's jaw flexed. "Delphine was a mistake I made when I was twenty-nine. Grandmother chose her for me, in a sense. I was lonely, and I ran an investigation on her too, and I found nothing, and I trusted the nothing. She sold me out to a tabloid the week after I proposed to her privately. I never told anyone that part. Not even Grandmother."

Maren stared at him. "You proposed to Delphine?"

"Privately. No ring. I didn't love her." His mouth twisted. "I proposed because I thought that's what a man did when he was thirty and had run out of reasons not to. She found out I was investigating her family, and she made me the villain in three separate columns. So I learned to run the checks first and feel later. It's a terrible system. I'm aware."

"It is a terrible system."

"But it's the only one I had until you." He took a step closer, and this time she didn't step back. "I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm asking you to stay long enough to let me earn it. You can keep the two million either way. You can walk out of this arrangement today and the money's yours, no strings, I'll sign whatever you need."

"You'd just pay me to leave?" Something raw cracked through her voice. "Is that supposed to make it better?"

"No," he said. "It's supposed to prove that the money was never the point."

The wind had picked up, whipping her hair across her face. He reached out slowly, giving her every chance to stop him, and tucked it back behind her ear.

"I can't fix the fact that I did the wrong thing," he said quietly. "I can only stop doing it. Starting today. I'll tell you everything. Anything you want to know about me, I'll answer. Ask me the worst question you can think of."

Maren studied him: the stubble, the red hands, the storm in his eyes gone gentle and unmoored. Then she asked the question she'd been circling since the office.

"Did you know?" she said. "In the elevator. When you kissed me. Did you already know everything, and kiss me anyway?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"And I've never wanted to be forgiven for anything as badly as I want to be forgiven for that," he said. "Because it wasn't a plan. It was the only thing I've ever done that wasn't."

Maren let out a long, unsteady breath. She didn't say I forgive you. She wasn't ready, and they both knew it.

But she let him walk her to the car, and when he held the door, she got in.