Chapter One #3
"A settlement."
"A meaningful one." He said it like the number was already fixed in his head, which it probably was. "Enough that her business isn't dependent on a single contract ever again, regardless of what happens between us."
"And after the year."
"We divorce. Quietly, amicably, with a story that satisfies the board and doesn't damage either of our reputations.
" He said it without any visible discomfort at the transactional bluntness of it, which Elena found almost more unsettling than if he'd shown some.
"You walk away with your family protected and a settlement of your own.
I retain control of the company. Everyone involved gets what they actually need, even if none of us get what we'd have chosen under different circumstances. "
"Except love doesn't work like a line item, Mr. Castellan, and neither does trust, and you're asking me to fake both in front of every person who matters to me for an entire year."
"I'm not asking you to fake trust." His eyes held hers, steady, unblinking.
"I'm asking you to fake a marriage's origin story.
What actually happens between us day to day is a separate question, and I have no interest in scripting your interior life for you.
I'm not that kind of man, whatever else you decide I am by the end of this conversation. "
"You're exactly that kind of man. You just did it four minutes ago, when you handed me a folder instead of asking me a question you already knew the answer to."
That landed. She watched it land, watched something flicker across his face that might have been the first honest reaction he'd given her all morning, gone again before she could name it for certain.
"I need to think," she said.
"You have forty eight hours." He stood, buttoned his jacket, and for a second looked almost tired, which she refused to feel anything about.
"After that, the offer closes and the file moves.
I'd encourage you not to discuss the specifics with your brother.
It won't help him and it will only frighten your mother before there's anything concrete to tell her. "
"You don't get to tell me how to protect my family."
"No," he agreed. "I suppose I don't. Not yet."
The yet sat in the room like a held breath.
She left without saying goodbye, walked past Priya's careful non-eye-contact, rode the elevator down forty-one floors with her reflection doubled in the polished doors, and didn't let herself cry until she was three blocks away, standing outside a bodega with a hand-lettered sign advertising fresh bagels, her whole body shaking with a fury that had nowhere yet to go and forty-eight hours to find somewhere.
She didn't go straight home. She walked instead, no destination, just movement, because movement was the only thing that had ever reliably kept the worst of her thoughts from catching up with her.
Midtown gave way to the low twenties, then the teens, then the particular hush of a Sunday-quiet weekday afternoon in a part of the city that hadn't yet been razed and rebuilt into something with a rooftop bar.
She found herself, without quite deciding to, three blocks from the building that used to house the Belmere's original architectural offices, a squat, unglamorous brick structure where her grandfather had kept his drafting tables, long since sold, long since converted into condominiums with exposed ductwork marketed as a feature instead of an oversight.
She stood across the street from it for a long time, hands in her coat pockets, and thought about the particular cruelty of a man like Damon Castellan sitting in a corner office built on the wreckage of buildings like this one, offering her the chance to save her brother by becoming, publicly, permanently, the woman who had married the family that took everything from hers.
She thought about her father's hands on the marble baseboard.
She thought about her mother's hands, swollen at the knuckles, still climbing scaffolding at fifty-nine because retirement wasn't a thing that happened to people whose businesses lived contract to contract.
She thought about Nico at nineteen, memorizing architectural terms like batting averages, and Nico now, twenty-six, unable to look her in the eye across a folder he didn't even know existed yet.
She thought, despite every instinct telling her not to, about the specific stillness of Damon Castellan's face when she'd told him he was exactly the kind of man he claimed not to be, and the flicker that had crossed it, brief and unguarded, before he'd folded it back into the careful blankness he clearly wore like armor.
She didn't know what to do with that flicker.
She wasn't sure yet whether it frightened her more or less than the folder.
By the time she got home, the sun had gone orange over the water and she had, without fully admitting it to herself, already started composing the terms she'd bring back to him tomorrow.