Chapter 3 #2
She set her phone on the glass table and slid it across to him, face up, the text still on the screen.
He read it twice, as she had.
"So here's my counteroffer," she said, before he could say anything she wasn't ready to hear.
"You need a wife who looks real for ninety days.
Fine. I'll be the best wife three million TikToks ever saw.
I'll smile, I'll wear the dresses, I'll charm your society columnists, I'll host your immaculate dinner.
I'll make your fake marriage look like the love story of the decade. "
"And in return?"
"Three months somewhere he can't reach me.
A new identity to start over under when this is done, a real one, papers, the whole thing, you have the money and the lawyers to do it.
And enough money to relocate. I want to disappear to Portland and open a brick-and-mortar restaurant and never be findable again. "
Yegor leaned back in his chair.
"Portland," he said.
"Portland."
"Why Portland?"
"Because nobody's looking for me in Portland, and it rains too much for him to want to follow."
Something almost like a smile touched the corner of his mouth and then thought better of it.
He named a number.
Tanisha didn't blink. She had spent her whole life being underestimated by men who had more money than sense, and she had learned long ago that the first number a rich man says is never his last.
"Double it," she said.
He looked at her for a long, level moment.
"Done," he said.
And just like that, it was.
She kept her face still, the way she'd taught herself to, because she didn't want him to see what it had cost to say it so lightly.
Untraceable. She'd made it sound like freedom.
She knew better. It meant no more Sunday dinners at Mama Boone's, no more standing in her grandmother's kitchen breathing in the smell of it.
It meant Renata, who had held her hair back on her worst nights, getting a postcard from nowhere with no return address.
It meant the crew, the ten people she'd built from nothing, waking up one morning to find she'd vanished without a word, because a word was a thread, and a thread was a way to be found.
She would find a way to take care of them, at least, some of his money quietly folded into severance and final paychecks and a little extra, enough to land softly while they found new kitchens.
A new name was just a tidy way of saying that everyone she loved would have to learn to live without her.
But she had to do this. Staying meant Dorian, and Dorian meant not being alive to miss any of them at all.
That was the price of being safe. She'd known it walking in.
She made herself sit there and not look away from it.
Could she really do it? Leave her life and all the people she loved?
*****
They signed the real contract that evening, in the same glass room, with Coralie as witness. The relocation provision and a non-disclosure agreement thick enough to stop a bullet. Tanisha read every word of it and Yegor noticed this. He filed the observation away.
"You're the first person who's ever read one of his contracts in front of me," Coralie murmured to her, low, while Yegor was on the phone across the room.
"Most people just want to know where to sign.
The board doesn't read them. His own sister doesn't read them.
You read the indemnification clause twice. "
"Where I'm from," Tanisha said, "the people who don't read the contract are the people it gets written against."
Coralie looked at her for a long moment, and something shifted in the lawyer's face, a recalibration.
"Good," she said. "Then you'll be fine. He's not a bad man, Ms. Boone.
I've worked for a lot of bad ones. He's just a careful one.
There's a difference, and people who don't read the contract never learn it. "
When it was done, Yegor walked her down to the car himself, which his security director, a granite-faced Russian named Stanislav, clearly thought was unnecessary and clearly knew better than to say so.
The Houston evening was warm and thick, the sky bruising purple at the edges.
A black town car idled at the curb. Tanisha stood beside it, the gold band glinting on her finger, suddenly aware that she was about to get into a stranger's car and be driven to a stranger's mansion and begin a stranger's life.
"This is insane," she said, mostly to herself.
"Yes," Yegor agreed.
"Three months."
"Three months."
"Can I ask you something?" She turned to face him properly. "Why'd you agree so fast? In there. I said double it and you didn't even blink. A man doesn't get to be worth a billion dollars by saying yes to the first number twice."
Yegor considered her in the purple light.
"Because the money was never the expensive part," he said.
"The expensive part is trusting a stranger with my name for ninety days.
You doubling the number told me something.
It told me you weren't desperate enough to take whatever I offered, which meant you weren't going to panic and that you could do this.
A desperate person makes mistakes. You weren't desperate.
You were just done being underpaid by men who assumed you would be.
" He almost smiled. "I paid double for a partner instead of a victim. It was a bargain."
Tanisha stared at him, genuinely thrown, because no one had ever explained her own behavior back to her quite that accurately.
"Huh," she said.
"What?"
"Nothing. You're just..." She shook her head. "Not what's on the magazine covers."
"No," he agreed quietly. "I'm usually not."
She put her hand on the car door. Then she paused, because he had not stepped back, and there was something he clearly wanted to say.
"I should warn you," he said quietly, "my mother is going to like you."
Tanisha frowned.
"Is that bad?"
"Catastrophic."
And before she could ask him what on earth he meant by that, he opened the car door, handed her in like she was made of glass, and shut it firmly between them.