Chapter 2 Hargrove and Co. #2
"I want to ask you to marry me," Weston said, and he crossed the workshop floor slowly, the way you'd approach something that might startle and run if you moved too fast, until he was standing on the other side of the worktable, close enough that she could see the specific exhaustion around his eyes that told her he hadn't slept since the reading of the charter that morning.
"For the charter. For eleven days that turn into however long it takes to convince a board of very suspicious old men that it's real.
I know it's insane. I know I have no right to ask you this, and I know the timing is unforgivable, showing up here when you clearly have your own things going on that you haven't told me about yet, and I'm going to ask about those in a minute, because I mean that.
But I need you to hear the rest of it first, because it changes what I'm actually offering. "
"There's more," Addie said flatly.
"There's a settlement," Weston said. "Whatever this marriage is, real or not, it's legally binding, and it comes with real financial terms, terms my attorney is drafting right now, terms that would include a payment to you, direct, no strings, structured however you need it structured, enough to handle whatever you need it to handle.
" He hesitated, and Addie watched him choose his next words with the particular care he used only when he already suspected they'd land somewhere painful.
"I don't know what's going on with the firm.
I can see it in this room, I can see it in the fact that Priya just left like she was trying not to be here for whatever conversation we were about to have, and I'm not going to pretend I came here today for your sake instead of mine.
I came here because I'm desperate and you're the only person I trust enough to ask.
But if there's a number that would fix whatever's wrong here, I want you to tell me, because whatever else this is, I am not going to let you say no to me for a reason I could have solved with a signature. "
Addie sat down slowly on the workshop stool behind her, because her legs had stopped feeling entirely reliable, and looked at the man she had known since she was nineteen years old, the same boy who'd sanded table legs beside her father because he didn't know how to grieve any other way, the same man who had shown up at her own father's funeral four months ago and stood at the back of the church because he said the front rows belonged to family and he didn't want to take up space that wasn't his, even though he had been closer to her father, in some ways, than half the actual relatives who'd sat in those front pews.
"Two hundred and ten thousand dollars," Addie said, before she'd fully decided to say it out loud. "By the end of next month, or I lose this building, my father's tools, and the firm's name to a company that's going to flip it for parts."
Weston went very still. "Say that again."
"You heard me."
"Two hundred and ten thousand dollars is nothing," Weston said, and there was something close to anger in his voice now, not at her, she understood immediately, but at the situation, at Vantage Point Capital, at whatever universe had decided both of them needed to be standing in this exact workshop on the same impossible day.
"That's nothing, Addie, that's a rounding error on a single quarterly report at the bank, and you've been sitting on this for how long without telling me? "
"Because it's not your problem to fix," Addie said, and heard how thin her own voice sounded, and hated it.
"Because you already do enough, and because the one thing I have never wanted from you, in thirteen years, is your money, and if I say yes to this, that's exactly what it becomes, and I don't know how to be your wife and not be the girl who married you for a bailout, because that's what every single person in your world is going to think the second they hear the terms."
"Then we don't tell them the terms," Weston said.
"We tell them the truth that matters, that I asked my oldest friend to marry me because there was nobody else in the world I trusted enough to ask, which happens to also be true, Addie, every word of it, and the money is a separate conversation, a business conversation, structured as a business conversation, not a payment for services, an investment, if that's easier, in a firm I actually believe in, run by someone I actually believe in, because I've watched you save buildings in this city that everyone else had already written off, and I am not going to stand here and let this be the one you lose because you were too proud to let me help. "
Addie looked down at her hands, at the sawdust still under her nails from the model she'd been sanding that morning, at her father's tools laid out on the felt cloth six feet away, and felt the full weight of what she was actually being asked settle into her chest, not the marriage itself, which was terrifying enough on its own, but the specific, complicated math of loving someone for thirteen years without ever letting herself examine the shape of that word too closely, and now being asked to marry him under circumstances designed, almost cruelly, to make it impossible to ever know whether either of them meant it.
"I need you to tell me something honestly," she said. "Not the Weston Calloway boardroom answer. The real one."
"Anything."
"If the charter didn't exist. If none of this was happening. Would you ever have asked me?"
Weston was quiet for a long moment, long enough that Addie thought he might not answer at all, and when he finally spoke, his voice had lost every trace of the careful, controlled cadence she'd watched him use in every negotiation she'd ever witnessed him conduct.
"I don't know," he said. "And I think that's the most honest answer I have, because I've spent thirteen years telling myself I'd never risk what we already have by asking for something more, and I don't know if that was wisdom or cowardice, and I think I'm about to find out, whether either of us is ready for the answer or not. "