Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
The terms, once he laid them out, were almost insultingly generous, the kind of generosity that only makes sense once you understand a man is buying something he considers priceless and therefore cheap at any price.
Money, enough that I'd never again have to calculate whether I could afford to leave a room I wanted to leave.
Protection, his name attached to mine in a way that would make Charles Hamilton's continued cruelty professionally and socially expensive.
Status, the kind that opens doors Charles had spent five years closing in front of me without my noticing.
And funding, real funding, for the design business I'd mentioned to exactly one person in my life, a business Charles had once called a hobby with the specific tone men use when they want a woman's ambition to sound smaller than it is.
In exchange, Donovan wanted a wife the entire world believed in completely.
"Not a quiet arrangement," he said. "Not friends who know and keep our secret over dinner parties.
My family cannot know. The board cannot know.
Lucy cannot know, and God help us both if Charles ever finds out, because he will use it the way he uses everything, as a weapon aimed at whoever's standing closest."
I asked him why it mattered so much that the lie be airtight rather than merely convincing.
He told me the will's language was specific enough that a marriage proven fraudulent in intent could be challenged in court, and Reginald Castellan had lawyers who would spend whatever it cost to manufacture that proof if they so much as smelled an opening.
"So we don't give them an opening," I said.
"We don't give them a hairline crack." He finally set his untouched drink down on the railing. "Everyone has to believe I wanted you. Not tolerated you. Not married you for convenience. Wanted you, specifically, the way a man wants the one thing he can't quite believe he gets to keep."
There was something in the way he said it, low and certain, that made the back of my neck prickle in a way I chose not to examine that night.
I told myself it was simply good acting, a preview of the performance he expected from both of us.
I didn't yet know how thin the line would get between performing a thing and becoming it.
"What happens to me when it's over," I asked. "After your birthday? After the will is satisfied and you don't need a wife anymore."
"You walk away with everything we negotiate now, intact.
" He said it like the simplest fact in the world, a man laying out terms he'd already decided he could live with.
"I don't believe in punishing people for the natural end of an arrangement they upheld in good faith.
You'll find I'm considerably more reliable about that than the last man you trusted. "
The reference to Charles landed exactly as precisely as he'd intended it to.
I told him I'd think about it. He told me, with the faint trace of a smile that didn't reach the rest of his face, that I had three days, and that Charles Hamilton would still be exactly this cruel on day four, so I shouldn't mistake patience for kindness.
I walked home that night instead of calling a car, three miles in heels I'd regret by morning, because I needed the time to feel my own thoughts without anyone else's voice filling the space around them.
The city looked different somehow, walking through it as a woman who'd just been handed an offer that could remake everything Charles had taken from me, though I couldn't yet tell whether that remaking would feel like victory or simply a different shape of captivity.
I thought about the eleven thousand dollars sitting in my own account, the first brick in a wall I'd built entirely myself, and wondered whether accepting Donovan's offer meant abandoning that wall or finally finishing it with someone else's resources doing the heavy lifting.
By the time I reached my apartment, blisters forming on both heels, I'd stopped asking myself whether I could trust Donovan Winthrop.
I'd started asking myself whether I could trust myself to walk into an arrangement this carefully built without losing track of which parts were performance and which parts, eventually, might stop being performance altogether.
I didn't have an answer that night. I only knew I'd be back at his lawyer's office within the week, one way or another, because Charles Hamilton's cruelty had taught me that standing still simply wasn't an option anymore.
He wasn't wrong. I gave myself three days anyway, mostly out of stubbornness, and spent every one of them watching Charles's name trend through my social circle like a virus I couldn't quarantine myself away from.