A Million Dollar Secret

POV: Catherine Rhodes

It was a bright afternoon in the city of Chicago, I was sitting on one of the most exquisite working environment there could be, yet the leather chair beneath me felt stiff, the kind that forces you to sit up straight, as if it were judging you.

I didn’t belong here, not in this penthouse office, not under this ceiling of glass and steel. The floor-to-ceiling windows behind Frey Johnson bathed the room in a bleak kind of light, the kind that exposed everything, everything except what he was thinking.

Across the desk, he sat like a statue carved out of entitlement; dark suit, crisp, silver cufflinks gleaming under the faint glow of the desk lamp. The view behind him was breath-taking, but all I could focus on was his unreadable face, sculpted and sharp like a blade that hadn't yet cut me… but might.

“You’ve had time to think about it,” he said, voice smooth and slow “Have you come to a decision?”

I glanced down at the paper work in front of me. A five year marriage, no children, and no interference in his private life in exchange for fifty million dollars.

I hadn’t slept the night before. I’d lain awake in the small guest room at home, staring at the ceiling, trying to count reasons not to come here. But each one fell apart when I remembered my father’s shallow breathing… the unpaid hospital bills… the creditors circling like vultures around our dying company and I couldn’t just watch them die. Not while there was still hope.

“This… This isn’t exactly something I dreamed about growing up,” I said, my voice thinner than I wanted it to be.

Frey tilted his head, like he was inspecting me. “Well, neither did I.” The way he said it chilled me, there was no apology in his voice, no hesitation, just a fact.

“Five years,” I repeated. “No children, ten million per year, and I have no say in what you do with your personal life?”

He leaned forward, the faintest trace of a smirk ghosting his lips. “That’s the deal.”

My heart pounded behind my ribs, but I forced my face to stay still.

I wasn’t stupid, I knew exactly what this meant, He didn’t want a wife he wanted a trophy. A lie that looked good in photographs and boardroom headlines, and one that he needed to secure his inheritance. I was willing to be that lie, for my family.

“What if I fall in love with you… like I once was” I asked, quietly, the words slipped out before I could stop them. And for a moment, everything in the room stilled, even the soft hum of the air conditioner seemed to pause. I didn’t mean to say it, but I meant it.

A part of me still remembered him, not the man in the suit before me now, but the boy I once knew, Frey Johnson. Messy-haired, loud-laughing, troublemaker Frey. The boy who dared me to climb the tallest tree in our Pensacola neighbourhood. The one who used to steal popsicles for me from the back of his dad’s freezer and swear he’d take the blame if we got caught. The boy who once swore, with his hands stained in red chalk, that he’d marry me someday, “when we’re all grown up and he takes over from his father.”

Indeed we’re going to get married, but only as a deal so he could take over from his father. That boy was gone, replaced by the cold, and detached man sitting across from me now. He looked at me like I was a stranger he happened to have a childhood history with.

“For the sake of both of us, let us hope that doesn’t happen” he said flatly, without even blinking. There was no emotion in his voice, not even cruelty just indifference and it hurt more than I expected it to.

He reached into the drawer and pulled out a pen and slid it across the desk. My name already sat on the documents, printed cleanly beneath his, waiting to be caged.

The pen he offered was the same kind I once used to draw hearts in the margins of my notebooks when we were thirteen but now it felt like a dagger.

“All that’s left is your signature,” he said.

I stared at the paper and for a second, I wanted to ask him if he remembered any of it: the tree house, the sand fights, the summer we both almost drowned, and he held my hand all the way back to shore. I wanted to ask if he even felt a flicker of something when he saw me now.

But I didn’t because I already knew the answer. The boy who once waited for me outside school with a half-melted snow cone in hand, just because I said I liked red cherry, didn’t exist anymore, this man, sitting across from me in an office that looked like it had never known warmth, had buried that version of himself so deeply, I wasn’t sure he even remembered who he used to be, and maybe he didn’t want to.

A soft gust of wind pressed against the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him. I wondered if the sky ever felt like I did, full of things it couldn’t say, moments it couldn’t let go of.

Frey didn’t look at me as a person anymore. I could see it now, painfully clear. He looked at me the way someone looked at a contract: something useful, something temporary, something he could fold up and put away when it no longer served him.

“For one last time, you understand the terms, right?” he asked again, breaking the silence. His voice was as flat as before, but there was a tightness behind it. Maybe impatience or something else. “No second thoughts?”

I nodded, slowly. “I understand.” But I didn’t think he did.

He didn’t understand what this cost me, what I was giving up, not just freedom, but dignity, hope, maybe even the last pieces of who I was. Because the moment I signed, I wasn’t just agreeing to marry him, I was agreeing to disappear.

Frey tapped the edge of the paper again, his gaze drifting to his watch, a sleek silver Rolex that probably cost more than what was left of my father’s company. “You can read the fine print again if you want,” he offered, though his tone said he didn’t expect or want me to.

I didn’t need to read it again, I’d memorised every word, every clause, every stipulation about what I could or couldn’t say to the media, how I was expected to dress in public, where I would be required to appear and with whom. A list of dates we’d need to be photographed together, planned sightings, and social posts drafted by his PR team.

“All that’s left is your signature,” he said as he placed the pen between us again.

It felt like a line drawn in blood. I looked at him one last time, not the way he was now, but the way he used to be. I tried, just for a heartbeat, to find the boy I once adored. The one I’d written letters to after I moved to Chicago. The one who never replied.

I let her, the younger version of me, whisper goodbye, then I reached for the pen and wrapped my fingers around it. “You’re not selling yourself,” I whispered beneath my breath. “You’re saving what’s left.” And I signed.