Terms & Conditions

The Cover Story

# Chapter Six: The Cover Story

Ivy had rehearsed the lie on the subway ride home, the way she'd rehearsed everything else this week — turning it over, testing which parts sounded true, sanding down the edges that felt too much like something out of a soap opera. By the time she walked into the apartment, she almost believed it herself, which she suspected was the only way it was going to work on anyone else.

Her mother was at the stove, still in her hospital-admin cardigan, the good one with the missing button she never got around to replacing, stirring something that smelled like garlic and adobo and every version of home Ivy had ever known. Bea was at the kitchen table, laptop open, looking marginally more alert than she had in days.

"There she is," Corazon said, not turning around. "You're smiling. That's new."

Ivy hadn't realized she was smiling. She set her bag down and tried to figure out, in real time, whether that was nerves or something else.

"I have news," she said.

Bea closed the laptop immediately, the particular full-body attention of someone whose entire week had been organized around waiting for news, good or bad, from anyone.

"Good news or hospital news?"

"Good news. I promise." Ivy pulled out a chair, sat, and made herself hold her mother's eyes when Corazon finally turned from the stove, because she'd decided somewhere around Fifty-Ninth Street that if she was going to do this, she was going to do it without flinching, because flinching was the thing that would give her away. "I met someone."

The kitchen went very quiet, the specific quiet of a family that had spent months bracing for bad news and had genuinely forgotten what the other kind sounded like.

"You met someone," Corazon repeated, slowly, like she was checking the words for a hidden second meaning.

"His name is Julian. He's — " Ivy had practiced this part the most, the part where she had to make three years of careful, guarded restraint sound like it had evaporated in a matter of days. "It's been fast. Really fast. I know how that sounds."

"How fast," Bea said, narrowing her eyes in exactly the way Ivy had known she would.

"We're getting married."

The silence that followed lasted long enough that Ivy could hear the pot on the stove starting to bubble over, unattended, and neither her mother nor her sister moved to catch it.

"Ivy Marisol Reyes," Corazon said, finally, in the tone she'd used exactly three times in Ivy's life, all of them preceding a lecture Ivy had fully deserved. "You have never once, in twenty-seven years, done anything remotely this fast. You took four months to decide on a couch."

"I know."

"You interviewed three different apartment brokers before you picked one, and one of them cried."

"That guy was unhinged, that's not — okay, fair, I hear how this sounds." Ivy pressed her palms flat against the table, grounding herself the way she did before service on a bad night. "I can't fully explain it. I know that's not fair to either of you, and I know it's going to sound insane, but I need you to trust me on this. He's — he's serious. He's stable. He's not some guy I met at a bar. And Mom — " she made herself say the next part carefully, because this was the part that had to land exactly right or the whole thing would unravel before it started, "— he can help. With Bea. With the money. That's not why I'm doing this, but it's part of why it's happening fast, and I'm not going to lie to you and pretend the timing's a coincidence."

Bea's face did something complicated — hope and suspicion arriving at the same time, tangled together in a way Ivy recognized because she felt the exact same tangle every time she thought about the number 340,000.

"Ivy," Bea said slowly, "did you find a sugar daddy."

"Bea."

"I'm serious! You meet a rich guy out of nowhere, you're engaged in a week, and suddenly there's money for my surgery? Forgive me for asking the obvious question."

"It's not like that." Ivy hated, more than she'd expected to, how close that guess had actually landed, and how far from the truth her denial had to travel to cover it. "It's real, Bea. I wouldn't do this if it wasn't real."

Corazon had gone quiet in a different way now — not suspicious exactly, but watchful, the particular stillness of a mother reading her daughter's face for the things she wasn't saying out loud. Ivy made herself hold still under it, the way she'd held still under Julian's attention in that glass office two days ago, and understood, with a small cold drop in her stomach, that lying to her mother was going to be harder than lying to anyone else in this entire arrangement, including herself.

"You love him," Corazon said. Not a question.

Ivy hesitated exactly one beat too long.

"I'm getting there," she said, which was, technically, not even a lie — just a truth aimed at a version of events that hadn't happened yet.

Something in her mother's shoulders eased, fractionally, and Corazon crossed the kitchen and pulled Ivy into a hug that smelled like garlic and adobo and twenty-seven years of a woman who'd never once, since Ivy's father left, let her daughters see her afraid.

"Then that's all I need to know," Corazon said into her hair. "You've been so careful for so long, anak. I was starting to worry you'd forgotten how to let anyone in." A pause, and when she pulled back, her eyes were bright in a way that made Ivy's chest ache with a guilt she hadn't fully braced for. "When do we meet him?"

"Soon," Ivy said. "I promise. Soon."

Bea was still watching her from across the table, arms crossed, unconvinced in the specific, stubborn way only a younger sister could manage, but she didn't push further — not yet, Ivy suspected, only because the mention of the surgery money had bought a temporary truce with her own skepticism.

"I want details," Bea said instead. "Real ones. Where'd you meet. What's he look like. Is he actually nice or just rich-nice, because those are different things and I need to know which one my sister's marrying."

Ivy laughed, and it came out more genuine than she'd expected, mostly out of relief that the hardest part of the conversation seemed to be over.

"He's — " She thought of the almost-smile in the office, the way he'd said *I'd rather you trust that you can leave than have you stay because you feel like you can't,* the flash of something raw underneath the composure when he'd talked about his mother. "He's complicated. In a good way, I think. We'll see."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got right now," Ivy said, and reached over to rescue the pot finally boiling over on the stove, grateful for the excuse to turn away from both their faces for just a moment, grateful for the small, ordinary task of saving dinner instead of the much larger, much harder task of holding a lie steady in front of the two people she least wanted to lie to in the entire world.

Later that night, alone in her room, she texted Priya.

*I need to tell you something and I need you to not freak out.*

Priya's response came back in under a minute, exactly as fast as Ivy had known it would.

*that sentence has never once preceded good news in the history of our friendship. what did you do*

Ivy stared at the screen for a long moment, thumb hovering, already exhausted by the shape of the lie she was about to type out for the second time that night, and thought — not for the first time since walking out of that glass tower — that the money had never been the hardest part of this arrangement. The hardest part was going to be everyone she loved, believing something about her heart that wasn't true yet, while she carried the actual truth around alone, tucked behind her ribs where nobody else could reach it.

*I'm getting married,* she typed, finally, and hit send before she could second-guess it. *His name is Julian. I'll explain everything tomorrow. Please don't hate me.*

The reply took longer this time — nearly three full minutes, which for Priya was an eternity — and when it came, it wasn't what Ivy expected at all.

*I could never hate you. but ivy. you better have a REALLY good explanation, because I've known you eleven years and you have never once in your life done anything this fast, and I'm scared, and I love you, and you're telling me this at eleven pm over TEXT.*

*tomorrow. coffee. before your shift. I'm not letting this go until I understand it.*

Ivy set the phone face-down on her nightstand and lay back in the dark, and for the first time since Harriet Voss's number had flashed across her screen two mornings ago, let herself feel the full weight of what she'd agreed to — not the money, not the contract, not even Julian himself, but this: the quiet, corrosive work of holding a secret from the people who knew her best, and hoping, with an intensity that surprised her, that two years from now they'd understand why she'd had to.