CHAPTER 3
Terms and Conditions
°°°
He didn't sign the second time either.
Three days after The Wrenhouse, Emery sat in the title company's small conference room, the same manila folder in front of her, the same six-week window ticking down to five and a half now, and watched Rhys Cade explain to a paralegal named Denise that he'd like to schedule the actual signing for the following week, once his attorney had finished reviewing the modification language, and felt something in her chest go tight and hot in a way that had nothing to do with hope and everything to do with the specific fury of watching a man who used to make decisions in half a second suddenly develop opinions about due diligence.
The conference room smelled like carpet cleaner and the flat staleness of a windowless space that had hosted a thousand other people's worst days — divorces, foreclosures, the quiet business of things ending.
She'd noticed that smell the first time she'd come here, two weeks ago, to start the paperwork on her own, and it had struck her then as fitting in a way she hadn't wanted to examine too closely.
Denise gathered her folder and murmured something about copies and stepped out, the door easing shut behind her with a soft, deliberate click that felt, to Emery, entirely too significant for a woman just going to use a photocopier.
"You could have told me this on the phone," she said, once Denise had excused herself to make copies and left them alone at the conference table. "Saved us both the drive."
"I wanted to do it in person."
"Why?"
He didn't answer that directly, which was an answer in itself.
Instead he slid a legal pad across the table — actual notes, she saw, his handwriting cramped and slanted the way it always was, a list of questions with a lawyer's name and phone number written at the top.
"I talked to Marcus Feld this morning. Real estate guy, does work for the club sometimes.
He flagged two things in the modification language he wants clarified before I sign anything with my name on it that also has yours. "
"That also has mine." She heard the edge in her own voice and didn't try to soften it. "Rhys, I've read that document eleven times. I wrote half the numbers on it myself."
"I know you did. I'm not questioning your numbers.
" He met her eyes, steady, and something about the steadiness made it worse, not better — the old Rhys certainty, the one that used to make her feel like the safest woman in three counties, now aimed at slowing her down instead of clearing her path.
"I'm making sure that if something goes sideways with the club side of things — and things have been a little sideways lately — you're not the one holding the exposure on a property with my signature on it. "
"What does that mean? What's sideways?"
"Nothing you need to worry about."
"Don't." The word came out sharper than she meant, and she watched it land, watched something flinch behind his eyes even as his face stayed carefully arranged.
"Don't do that. Don't decide what I need to worry about.
That's — " She stopped herself before she finished the sentence, because finishing it meant saying the thing out loud in a title company conference room with a paralegal three feet away behind a half-closed door, and she wasn't ready to say that thing out loud anywhere yet, let alone here.
That's what you did before. That's exactly what you did before.
The words sat in her mouth like a stone she'd swallowed and couldn't quite get back up, familiar and awful, the shape of an argument she'd had with herself a hundred times in the shower, in the truck, at two in the morning when sleep wouldn't come.
She'd promised herself in the parking lot before walking in that she wouldn't say it.
Business only. She was keeping the promise.
It didn't feel like keeping a promise. It felt like choking on one.
"That's what," he said quietly. Not defensive. Just asking.
She made herself breathe. Made herself remember the rule she'd set for herself in the truck on the drive over, the one she'd repeated like a mantra at every red light: business only. No relitigating the past. This is a signature, not a reunion.
"That's not why I'm here," she said instead, which wasn't quite the sentence she'd swallowed but was true enough to stand on its own.
"I'm here because I have a business to build and a deadline I can't move.
If there's a real problem with the language, fine, fix it.
But I need a date, Rhys. A real one. Not 'once my attorney's had a look. '"
He was quiet for a second. Then he pulled out his phone, checked something, and said, "Next Tuesday.
Ten a.m. I'll have Feld's changes back by Monday and we can review them together before we sign, if you want.
Or you can just tell me you trust my read on it and we do it Tuesday without the extra meeting. "
It was, she had to admit, a reasonable offer.
More reasonable than she'd braced for. She'd walked in half-expecting a fight, some version of the man who used to make her feel like every decision that touched the club was above her pay grade, and instead she'd gotten this — careful, deliberate, almost solicitous in a way that unsettled her more than resistance would have.
It was easier to be angry at the Rhys she remembered than to figure out what to do with whatever version of him was sitting across the table now, asking her real questions and writing down her real answers on a legal pad like they mattered.
"Monday," she said. "I want to see the changes myself."
"Monday works." He made a note on the legal pad, and for a second the office quiet held something almost companionable — two people who used to run a household together falling, without meaning to, back into the shorthand of managing something jointly.
It scared her more than the six-week deadline had.
The deadline was a fact. This was a feeling, and feelings were the thing she'd left this marriage specifically to stop having about him.
"There's one more thing," she said, before the quiet could get comfortable. "I want to set some ground rules. For the Monday meeting, and Tuesday, and whatever comes after if this drags out."
"Okay."
"This is business. Property, signatures, the deal.
It's not — " She made herself hold his gaze, even though it cost her something to do it.
"It's not an opening to talk about anything else.
Not us. Not what happened. I'm not doing this so we can work our way back to some conversation I already had with myself a long time ago. "
Something moved behind his eyes — she couldn't read it fully, wouldn't let herself try too hard — and then he nodded, once, careful. "Understood."
"I mean it, Rhys."
"I heard you the first time." A beat. "Business. Property. Signatures. Those are the terms."
"Those are the terms," she repeated, and told herself the small ache in her chest at hearing him agree so readily was relief, not disappointment, and didn't examine too closely whether she believed herself.
He walked her out to the parking lot, which she hadn't asked him to do and didn't stop him from doing, some part of her still running on nine years of habit even now.
The afternoon had gone gray and close, the kind of humid Carolina heat that sat on your skin instead of just touching it, thunderheads building somewhere west of town in a way that promised a storm by evening.
She was digging her keys out of her bag when his phone buzzed against his hip — she felt it more than heard it, close enough to him now that the vibration carried — and watched his whole body go still in a way that had nothing to do with the heat.
He didn't reach for it. Didn't check it in front of her the way he had three days ago at The Wrenhouse.
But she saw his jaw set, saw something pass behind his eyes that he was working hard to keep off his face, and the shop-honed part of her that noticed when a seam was about to give noticed it now, plain as day.
"You should get that," she said.
"It's fine."
"Rhys."
"It's fine, Em." His voice had gone careful in a way she recognized — not lying exactly, but choosing his words with the precision of a man building a wall one brick at a time. "I'll walk you to your truck."
She let him. She told herself it was because arguing about it in a parking lot wasn't worth the energy, and not because some small, traitorous part of her wanted three more minutes of him beside her, matching her steps the way he always had, half a pace behind and to the left, positioned — she'd never let herself think the word before, not once in eleven months, and it arrived now unbidden and unwelcome — positioned like a man who was still, out of some old and stubborn instinct, standing between her and whatever might come from the other direction.
At her truck, she unlocked the door and turned to say something final and businesslike, and instead found herself looking at him a beat too long, the humid air thick between them, the ghost of nine years standing in the two feet of parking lot asphalt that separated her shoulder from his chest.
"Monday," she said.
"Monday," he agreed, and didn't move to close the distance, which she registered as either restraint or relief, she genuinely couldn't tell which, and hated that she couldn't tell.
She got in the truck. Pulled out of the lot.
Watched him in the rearview mirror for exactly as long as it took to reach the stop sign at the end of the block — watched him pull his phone out the second he thought she couldn't see him anymore, watched his shoulders go rigid reading whatever was on the screen — and felt the same cold thread of unease she'd felt three days ago in the garage bay, the sense of a door in this man's life that used to open for her automatically and now stayed shut on some kind of principle she didn't understand and hadn't been given permission to ask about.
She'd married a man who told her everything, once.
Or she'd believed she had, which she was slowly coming to understand were not necessarily the same thing, and the distinction between them was doing something uncomfortable to the shape of her memory of the last nine years, retroactively, one small withheld thing at a time.
She didn't want to think about that on the drive home.
She thought about it anyway, the whole way, the thunderheads finally breaking somewhere over the interstate behind her, fat drops starting to hit the windshield right as she turned onto her own street.
Business only, she reminded herself, and turned onto the main road, and did not look back again.
She thought about it the whole drive home anyway.