3. Chapter 3
Julia
Iam on my third coffee and my second read-through of a twelve-page contract when Ivy drops into the chair across from me. "You look like someone doing something they'll either regret or write a memoir about."
"Both, probably," I say, without looking up.
Ivy Saunders has been my closest friend and the operational backbone of Match Maven for three years, which means she knows the difference between my focused face and my this-might-be-a-catastrophe face.
She pulls her legs up under her in the chair — a habit that has survived every professional setting she has ever occupied — and waits with the patient, interested energy of a woman who already knows something is wrong and has correctly calculated that I will tell her faster if she doesn't ask.
I set the contract down.
"Billionaire," I say. "Fake relationship. Six weeks. He wants me to be the girlfriend — not find him one. Me. There's a gala deadline and a neighborhood protection clause and if I breach the contract I forfeit the entire commission."
Ivy's eyebrows go up in slow succession, like a scoreboard ticking through a very unexpected final score.
"He wants you," she says. "To be his girlfriend."
"Fake girlfriend."
"Sure." She does not sound convinced that the distinction matters. "For six weeks."
"Correct."
"The Sunset Park corridor," I add. "Noah Thomas's cousin has it in his acquisition pipeline. The deal blocks it permanently."
Her eyebrows have reached their maximum elevation. "Sunset Park," she repeats.
"Yes."
"Your Sunset Park?"
"It's not— yes." I pick up my coffee. "The commission is also significant."
"Julia." Ivy's voice has gone carefully level, the tone she uses when she is about to say something she knows I don't want to hear. "Are you sure about this?"
"It's fine. I'm practical. It's six weeks."
She studies me for a moment in the way that she tends to — not invasive, just thorough, the look of someone taking an accurate reading rather than looking for a fight. Then she nods once and lets it go, which is one of approximately four hundred reasons I have kept her close for three years.
"Is he as unreasonably attractive in person as the press photos suggest?" she asks.
"That is completely beside the point."
"That means yes."
"Ivy."
"I'm just establishing the full scope of the situation," she says, entirely unrepentant, and reaches across my desk to steal the last of my almond croissant.
Celeste calls at eleven to confirm both legal teams have signed off.
I thank her, hang up, and sit for a moment at my desk with the contract in front of me and the pen my grandmother gave me when I started at Match Maven held in both hands.
It is a good pen — heavy, silver, the kind of object that means something because of who gave it and under what circumstances.
My grandmother pressed it into my palm on the day I signed my employment contract and said every agreement you make with a clear conscience is worth signing with a good pen.
I think about that for a moment. Then I think about 411 Cypress Avenue and the green awning and the twenty-two years my family spent building something in that corner of Brooklyn before it was taken apart by people who never once set foot inside.
I sign the contract.
The clause is exactly as stark as it read the first six times: termination without mutual consent constitutes breach and forfeits all commission.
Six weeks. I put the contract in my tote, straighten my desk, and tell myself that six weeks is a finite and survivable amount of time. I have survived worse with less.
I almost believe it.
Noah's penthouse is exactly what I expected and nothing I was prepared for.
The building is the kind that doesn't have a visible sign — just a discreet address and a lobby that communicates wealth through what it has chosen to leave out.
No marble waterfall feature. No chandelier.
Just space, and good light, and the quiet confidence of a building that knows it doesn't need to perform.
I take the elevator to the top floor with my tote, my printed agenda, and a bottle of Sancerre I am absolutely expensing to the Thomas account, and I give myself the length of the ride to do the thing I always do before a difficult first session: I remind myself that I am the professional in the room and that I have walked into harder situations than this and come out the other side with my composure intact and my client better for having known me.
The elevator opens directly into the foyer of the penthouse and Noah is already at the door, which means he heard the elevator, which means he was listening for it.
He is in a gray shirt with the sleeves rolled to the forearm — the same move as the white shirt in my office, which makes me think it's less a stylistic choice and more a default state, like a man who starts every day fully dressed and then immediately begins dismantling it — and he looks at the bottle of wine in my hand and then at the printed agenda I am holding out to him and his expression does something that is not quite a frown and is somehow worse.
"You printed an agenda," he says.
"I print agendas for all my clients." I walk past him into the penthouse because waiting to be invited in would concede ground I have no intention of giving up. "It helps establish structure."
He takes the agenda. I hear the quality of his silence as he reads it — not the silence of someone absorbing information, the silence of someone deciding how to respond to something they find objectionable — and I keep moving into the great room, which is floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides and the Manhattan skyline laid out beyond it like something that was built to make people feel the scale of their own ambitions.
I do not let myself stop and look at it. That's what he wants, probably, but I'm not going to give the skyline the satisfaction.
"There's a section here called Warmth Fundamentals," he says, from behind me.
"Yes."
"It has sub-bullets."
"Noah." I set the wine on the kitchen island, locate a drawer that looks like it might contain a corkscrew, and find one on the second try. "Sit down."
A pause. Then the sound of him pulling out a barstool and sitting, which I count as a minor victory. I uncork the Sancerre, find two glasses in a cabinet that is organized with the precision of someone who either has exceptional personal habits or an exceptional housekeeper, and pour.
"We're starting with conversation," I tell him, sliding a glass across the island.
"Active listening, to be exact. Because in two meetings you have spoken approximately two hundred words and I have done the rest of the work, and in six weeks you are going to need to convince your grandmother, your board, and at least three independent witnesses that you are a man capable of sustaining genuine interest in another human being.
" I pause. "In me, to be clear. So." I sit down across from him, open to the first page of the agenda, and meet his eyes. "We're going to practice."
He looks at me over his wine glass. "You want me to practice listening."
"I want you to practice responding. There's a difference." I check my watch. "Two minutes. I'm going to tell you something true about myself and you're going to listen without interrupting or checking your phone, and without the face you're making right now."
"I'm not making a face."
"You're definitely making a face."
Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. The ghost of the ghost of an expression. "Go ahead," he says.
I note, in the privacy of my own head, that I am about to coach a man to be convincingly in love with me, which is either the most professional thing I have ever done or the least. I have not decided which.
I tell him about the first client I ever lost — a woman in her late forties who came to me eighteen months after her divorce, terrified and brave in equal measure, who matched perfectly on paper with a widower I had spent six weeks cultivating and then self-sabotaged the introduction because she decided at the last moment that she wasn't ready and I didn't push back hard enough.
I tell him what I learned from it: that readiness is not a state people arrive at on their own, it's a threshold you have to help them cross, and that being kind in the short term is not the same as being useful.
I talk for two minutes. I keep my eyes on his.
He does not interrupt. He does not check his phone. He does not make the face.
What he does is listen — and I mean actually listen, not the performed version where someone maintains eye contact and nods at intervals, but the version where you can feel the quality of their attention, where the room gets quieter somehow, where you become aware that your words are being received and weighed rather than simply heard.
It is disarming in a way I did not budget for.
When I stop talking he is quiet for a moment.
"You still think about her," he says. "That client."
It is not a question. It is an observation, accurate and unbidden and delivered without the softening hedge that most people would attach to it, and it lands somewhere slightly left of center in my chest in a way I immediately reclassify as professional interest.
"Occasionally," I say. "Your turn."
He picks up his wine. Sets it down. "What do you want me to say?"
"Anything true."
Another pause, longer this time — long enough that I start to think he is going to redirect or deflect — and then he says, without looking at me: "I kept my grandfather's watch after he died. I don't wear it. I don't know why I kept it."
The kitchen settles around us. Somewhere below, the city does its indifferent, constant thing.
I write nothing down. I don't reach for the agenda. I just say: "How long ago did he die?"
"Four years."
"And the watch is—"
"In a drawer." His eyes come back to mine. "In the bedroom. I've opened the drawer twice."