7. Nichole
— ? —
Nichole
Eight o’clock finds me standing outside the study door, trying to remember how to breathe.
I’ve been running through every possible scenario. He’s firing me. He’s reporting me for some violation I didn’t know I committed. He’s offering me a raise in exchange for signing a non-disclosure agreement about his family’s dysfunction. He’s-
The door opens before I can knock.
Callum is standing there in shirtsleeves, no jacket, no tie. He looks like he hasn’t slept either. There are shadows under his eyes and a tension in his jaw that I recognize from the mirror.
“Come in,” he says.
I come in.
The study is different in the morning light. Less museum, more office - papers on the desk, a coffee cup with a ring stain on the wood, books that actually look read instead of decorative. He doesn’t sit. Neither do I.
“Close the door.”
I close the door.
The silence stretches. He’s looking at me the way he looked at me that first day, in the hall with all the other candidates - like he’s reading something written on me that I can’t see. But there’s something different in it now. Something almost like uncertainty.
“Marry me.”
The words land in the space between us like a grenade. I hear them, process them, and then my brain simply stops.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “What?”
“Marry me.” He says it again, flat, unadorned, like he’s asking me to pass the salt. “One year. On paper. There’s no romance in this and I’m not going to insult you by pretending there is.”
I laugh.
It comes out ugly, harsh, nothing like amusement. “Is this a joke?”
“My mother wants a wife. The papers want a wife. My daughter needs-” He stops. Starts again. “My daughter wants you. She chose you on a day when she could have chosen anyone, and she hasn’t let go since.”
“She’s a child. She wants a lot of things.”
“Yes. And most of them I can buy.” He moves to the window, his back to me, and I realize it’s the same pose he took when he interviewed me - when he asked about my qualifications and I told him I had none he’d recognize.
“Your brother. The treatment. In exchange for one year of marriage, I pay for all of it. Start to finish. Best in the country. And I never bring it up again.”
The floor tilts.
I reach for the back of a chair, steadying myself, trying to make the room hold still long enough for me to think.
“So you’re buying me,” I hear myself say.
“I’m hiring you.” He turns. “There’s a difference and you know it, or you’d have walked out already.”
“Say it plainer.”
“Fine.” He puts his hands flat on the desk, leaning forward, and his eyes lock onto mine. “I have something you need and you have something I need and neither of us has anything else. That’s every marriage I’ve ever watched, Nichole. At least ours would be honest about it.”
“Honest.” The word tastes like ash. “You’re standing there offering to buy my brother’s life, and you’re calling it honest.”
“Would you prefer I lie? Tell you I’ve fallen in love with you?
That this is some fairy tale where the billionaire sweeps in and saves the poor girl out of the goodness of his heart?
” His voice hardens. “I don’t have that kind of goodness.
I have money and I have need and so do you.
We can pretend otherwise, or we can look at what this actually is. ”
“And what is it actually?”
“A transaction between two people who are out of options.”
I should walk out. I should slap him, scream at him, storm out of this house and never come back. I should hold onto my dignity with both hands and tell him exactly what he can do with his money and his transaction and his cold, calculated proposal.
But my brother is dying.
My brother is dying and there’s a number that can save him and I’ve been doing math that doesn’t work for months and this man - this infuriating, impossible man - just offered me a way to make it work.
I hate myself for what I’m about to do.
“The terms,” I say. “What are they?”
Something shifts in his face. Relief, maybe. Or recognition.
“One year. We live as husband and wife - same house, public appearances, the whole performance. At the end of the year, we divorce. You keep your salary for the year, plus a settlement we can negotiate. Your brother’s treatment is covered regardless - that’s not contingent on you staying the full term. ”
“Separate bedrooms?”
“Adjoining, because the staff talk. But yes. Separate.”
“Your daughter.”
His jaw tightens. “What about her?”
“She can’t know.” I take a step toward him. “If we do this - and I’m not saying I will - she cannot know it’s an arrangement. You said yourself, she’s already attached. If she thinks I’m her stepmother and then finds out it was all a transaction-”
“No one knows. That’s the agreement. Not the staff, not my mother, not Olivia.” He meets my eyes. “To everyone outside this room, it’s real.”
“For a year.”
“For a year.”
I should ask more questions. I should negotiate, demand concessions, protect myself with clauses and conditions. But I’m standing in a dead man’s study doing the math I swore I’d never do, weighing my dignity against my brother’s life, and the numbers only add up one way.
“Say no,” Callum says quietly, “and you keep your job. I mean that. Nothing changes. I’ll find another way to-”
“That’s the cruelest thing you’ve said yet.”
He stops. “Why?”
“Because it makes it my choice.” I’m at the door now, my hand on the knob, and I can feel him watching me, waiting.
“If you forced me, I could hate you for it. If you gave me no option, I could call myself a victim. But you’re giving me a choice, which means whatever I decide-” My voice catches. “Whatever I decide is on me.”
Silence.
I grip the knob until my knuckles go white. I think about Danny in that hospital bed, gray and joking and terrified. I think about the number Dr. Sorenson quoted, the one I’ll never reach on my own. I think about twenty-one percent versus sixty-three.
“One year,” I say.
“One year.”
I turn to face him.
“And Callum.” His name feels strange in my mouth, too intimate, like I’ve crossed some line I can’t see. “If you ever look at me like you own me, I’ll take your daughter’s whole world with me when I go.”
His expression doesn’t change. But something behind his eyes does.
“She’d follow you,” he says.
“I know.”
“She’d follow you and she’d never forgive me.”
“I know that too.”
The silence stretches between us, thick with everything we’re not saying.
I’ve just threatened him with the only thing he actually cares about, and instead of getting angry, instead of withdrawing the offer, he just stands there looking at me like I’ve passed some test he didn’t know he was administering.
“I know,” he says finally. “That’s why I chose you.”
I don’t have an answer for that. I don’t have an answer for any of this.
So I turn and I walk out of the study, and I don’t let myself think about what I’ve just agreed to until I’m alone in my room with the door locked behind me.
Then I sit down on the edge of the bed and I put my head in my hands and I try to figure out how I became the kind of woman who sells herself for money.
Not the kind, I tell myself. The only kind. The kind who loves her brother enough to do what it takes.
It doesn’t help.
Nothing helps.
But tomorrow I’ll sign whatever papers Callum puts in front of me, and Danny will get his treatment, and for one year I’ll live in this cold beautiful house pretending to be someone’s wife.
After that, I’ll figure out how to live with myself.
After that, I’ll figure out who’s left.