Chapter 3 A Reasonable Proposal
They ended up at Addie's apartment two hours later, not because either of them had suggested it directly, but because the workshop had started to feel too small for a conversation that size, and Weston's car had simply turned in that direction without either of them saying the address out loud, the way it always had for thirteen years, his instincts and hers apparently still calibrated to the same frequency even in the middle of the strangest day of both their lives.
Addie's apartment sat above a bakery three streets back from the harbor, in a building her father had restored himself fifteen years ago as a favor to the owner, and the smell of the ovens below still drifted up through the floorboards most mornings, bread and cinnamon and something that always made Weston think of every early morning he'd ever spent here, sitting on her fire escape with two cups of coffee, talking through whatever crisis either of them was navigating that particular week, back when the crises were smaller and the stakes belonged only to them.
"I need to understand the actual terms," Addie said, once they were both seated at her kitchen table, the same table where Weston had helped her study for her licensing exam eight years ago, the surface still scarred with the same water ring from a coffee mug neither of them had ever bothered to sand out.
"Not the settlement. The marriage itself.
What does this actually look like, day to day, for however long it needs to last."
Weston had spent the drive over organizing exactly this in his head, because he had known, the moment she'd said yes with her eyes before she'd said it with her mouth, that Addie Hargrove would not walk into an arrangement this large without understanding every clause of it first, and he respected that about her too much to offer anything less than complete honesty.
"Legally, we need to be married before my birthday, which gives us eleven days," he said.
"The charter doesn't specify a ceremony, a venue, anything beyond a legal marriage certificate and, implicitly, a household, which Harold's interpretation of the original language suggests means we need to actually live together, not maintain separate residences with a marriage certificate as a formality.
Griffin's attorneys are going to look for exactly that gap, so we can't leave it open.
That means you'd move into Calloway House, at least for the foreseeable future, which I understand is an enormous thing to ask, given everything else you're navigating right now. "
"Calloway House," Addie repeated, and something crossed her face that Weston recognized, the specific complicated feeling of a woman who had grown up watching that house from a respectful distance her entire life, who had been inside it exactly a handful of times over thirteen years, always as a guest, always aware, in some small persistent way, that the house belonged to a world that wasn't quite hers, even when the boy who lived in it had never once made her feel that way himself.
"That's a lot of house for someone who grew up in an apartment over a bakery. "
"It's a lot of house for me too," Weston said. "I've lived in it my whole life and I still get lost in the east wing. That's not the part I'm worried about."
"What are you worried about."
"That the board is going to expect us to be convincing," Weston said.
"Not just legally married. Convincingly married.
There will be dinners, board functions, at least one major gala in the next month that every major client of the bank attends, and every single person in that room is going to be looking for a reason not to believe us, because Griffin has spent three years building relationships with exactly those people, telling them, without ever saying it outright, that I'm not settled enough to run this institution the way it deserves to be run.
If we do this halfway, it doesn't just fail to convince the board.
It hands Griffin exactly the ammunition he needs. "
Addie was quiet for a moment, turning her coffee mug slowly on the table without drinking from it. "So we have to actually act like a married couple. In public. Constantly. To people who've known us both since we were kids and who are going to be watching every single interaction for a crack."
"Yes."
"That includes touching you. In front of people. Like it's normal."
"Yes," Weston said, and something in his voice had gone quieter, more careful, in a way that made Addie look up from her mug directly at him for the first time since they'd sat down.
"I know what I'm asking. I've thought about almost nothing else for the last two hours, and I want to be honest with you about the part of this that scares me more than the board does, which is that we've spent thirteen years being extremely careful never to let this exact thing happen, and I don't actually know what happens to either of us once we stop being careful. "
Addie set the mug down. Outside, the bakery below had started its evening cleanup, the specific clatter of trays being stacked that she had fallen asleep to a thousand times, and she found herself thinking, absurdly, of every moment over thirteen years where she had caught herself wanting something from Weston Calloway that she had no framework for wanting, not as his friend, and had simply set it down again, the way you'd set down something too hot to hold, telling herself it would cool eventually if she just left it alone long enough.
It had never cooled. She understood that now, sitting at her own kitchen table with her father's failing business hanging over one shoulder and this impossible proposal hanging over the other, in a way she had successfully avoided understanding for the better part of a decade.
"I need terms," she said, because focusing on the practical was the only thing keeping her voice steady.
"Real ones. A prenuptial agreement that protects both of us.
A clear end date, or at least a clear condition for when this ends, if it ends.
And I need you to promise me something, right now, before either of us says yes to anything else. "
"Name it."
"If this stops being something either of us can handle, emotionally, not legally, if it starts costing either of us more than either of us can pay, we tell each other.
Immediately. No pretending everything's fine because the board is watching.
I've watched you do that your entire life, West, bury something because the timing was inconvenient for everyone except you, and I am not marrying a version of you that does that to me too. "
Weston looked at her for a long moment, and something in his expression cracked open just slightly, the specific unguarded look she had seen exactly twice before, once at his mother's funeral and once, six months ago, at his grandfather's, and Addie understood, watching it happen a third time, sitting across from her at a kitchen table instead of standing at a graveside, that whatever this arrangement turned out to be, it had already stopped being simple the moment he walked through her workshop door that morning.
"I promise," Weston said.
"Then yes," Addie said, and heard her own voice say it before she'd entirely finished deciding, the way the truest things always seemed to arrive before her mind had finished arguing with itself.
"I'll marry you. For the charter, for the firm, for thirteen years of you showing up in that workshop when nobody else did.
But I need you to understand something too, before either of us signs anything. "
"What."
"I'm not doing this halfway either," Addie said.
"If we're going to convince an entire board of skeptical old men and your cousin's private investigators and everyone who's ever known us both since we were kids, then for however long this lasts, we're not performing a marriage.
We're going to have one. Real dinners. Real conversations.
Whatever it takes to make it true enough that nobody can tell the difference, including us. "
Weston reached across the scarred kitchen table and took her hand, the first time in thirteen years he had held it for longer than the length of a hug, and Addie felt the specific, terrifying weight of exactly how much simpler her life would have been if she'd let herself want this a decade ago, before there was a charter clause and a failing business and eleven days standing between whatever this had always secretly been and whatever it was about to become.
"Then we do it right," Weston said. "Starting with a wedding neither of us has any idea how to plan in eleven days."
Addie laughed, finally, a real laugh this time, the tension in her shoulders breaking loose just enough to let something lighter in behind it. "We're going to need a lawyer, a courthouse date, and possibly a miracle."
"I have the lawyer," Weston said. "Harold's drafting terms as we speak. I can get us a courthouse date within the week if I make one phone call tonight."
"And the miracle?"
Weston's mouth curved into that same almost-smile she'd known since she was nineteen, except there was something underneath it now that hadn't been there this morning, something that looked, if she let herself believe it, dangerously close to hope.
"I think the miracle already happened," he said.
"Thirteen years ago, when your father handed me a sanding block instead of asking why I was standing in his workshop crying, and told me I could stay as long as I needed to.
I've been getting away with it ever since. "
Addie didn't have an answer for that, not one she trusted herself to say out loud without her voice breaking, so she simply held onto his hand a little tighter, and let the sound of the bakery closing up below them fill the silence, and tried not to think too hard about the fact that in eleven days, she was going to become Weston Calloway's wife, for reasons that had started as a business arrangement and were already, dangerously, becoming something else entirely.