Chapter Three: A Marriage of Paper

Nadia hadn't slept the night before her wedding.

She lay in her narrow bed staring at the ceiling, running through everything she'd overheard outside Mr. Grant's office again and again, trying to make sense of it. *Vivienne. Five years. Everything exactly where it needs to be.* None of it fit together into anything she could act on, and by morning she'd told herself the same thing a dozen times — that she had bigger problems than a conversation she didn't understand. Her mother needed the money. That was the only thing that mattered.

She dressed in the small courthouse office Mr. Grant had arranged, a simple ivory dress that fit like it had been chosen by someone who'd never met her, which she supposed it had. No white gown, no flowers, no guests waiting in rows. Just Mr. Grant, a witness she didn't recognize, and a clerk who looked bored enough that Nadia wondered how many contract marriages passed through this same office in a single month.

Damian arrived exactly on time, dressed in a dark suit, his expression as unreadable as it had been in his office. He didn't comment on her dress. He didn't comment on anything.

"Ready?" he asked, like they were about to sit through a business meeting rather than get married.

"Ready," Nadia said, because there was nothing else to say.

The ceremony took eleven minutes. Nadia counted, mostly to keep her mind on something other than the strangeness of repeating vows to a man she'd met exactly once. When the clerk pronounced them married, Damian didn't kiss her. He shook her hand, briefly, like he was closing a deal, and Nadia supposed that was exactly what he was doing.

"The car will take you to the house," he said afterward, already checking something on his phone. "My assistant, Ms. Reyes, will show you around. I have a meeting I can't move."

And then he was gone, and Nadia was a married woman standing alone in a courthouse hallway, wondering what exactly she'd just done.

The Hale estate sat on the edge of the city, behind gates that took nearly a full minute to open. Nadia had grown up in a two-bedroom apartment with paper-thin walls; the house in front of her now looked like it belonged in a magazine, all pale stone and glass, gardens manicured into perfect green rows.

Ms. Reyes, a brisk, kind-faced woman who Nadia guessed was close to her mother's age, met her at the door.

"Mrs. Hale," she said, and Nadia flinched slightly at the name, still foreign in her ears. "Let me show you to your room."

*Your room.* Not *your husband's room.* Not *your shared room.* Nadia understood immediately, and felt a strange, unexpected relief at the clarity of it.

The room was larger than her entire old apartment, with a bed that could have slept four people comfortably and a view of the gardens below. Ms. Reyes set her single suitcase — everything Nadia owned in the world — on a bench at the foot of the bed, looking almost apologetic at how little there was to carry.

"Mr. Hale keeps to himself, mostly," Ms. Reyes said carefully, like she was choosing her words with some effort. "Breakfast is at seven, if you'd like to join him, though he often takes it in his office instead. Dinner is more likely to be together, for appearances, when there are events."

"Appearances," Nadia repeated.

"Yes, ma'am." Ms. Reyes hesitated at the door. "For what it's worth — I've worked for this family a long time. I've never seen Mr. Hale agree to something like this before. Whatever your reasons were for saying yes, I imagine his were just as serious."

She left before Nadia could ask what she meant by that.

Dinner that first night was quiet, stiff, conducted at a table long enough to seat twelve, though only two chairs were used, set at opposite ends like an afterthought. Damian ate quickly, answered emails between bites, and said almost nothing beyond a handful of logistical details — a gala in two weeks that would require her attendance, a stylist who would come by to fit her for appropriate clothing, a car that would take her wherever she needed to go, within reason.

"I appreciate you being direct about the terms," Nadia said finally, when the silence had stretched long enough that she couldn't stand it anymore. "It makes this easier."

Damian looked up from his phone, something almost surprised crossing his face, like he hadn't expected her to speak at all. "Most people in your position would have tried to make this into more than it is."

"I'm not most people," Nadia said. "I need the money. You need a wife on paper. I don't need to pretend it's anything else."

For the first time since she'd met him, something like real interest flickered in his eyes. "No," he said slowly. "I suppose you don't."

It wasn't warmth, not exactly. But it was the first moment since she'd walked into his office that Nadia felt like he was actually looking at her, rather than through her.

She didn't see him again for three days.

Ms. Reyes explained that he traveled often for business, and Nadia spent the time exploring the house, calling the hospital twice a day to check on her mother, and trying to convince herself that the strange arrangement she'd signed herself into might actually be survivable. Her mother's treatment had already begun. The money had already been transferred, more of it than Nadia had ever seen in one place. Whatever else was happening around her, at least that part was working.

On the fourth night, she was walking past Damian's study, drawn by the light spilling out from under the door, when she heard him on the phone, his voice low and tense in a way she hadn't heard before.

"—no, I told you, five years, that's the arrangement, that's what we agreed to." A pause. "I don't care what Aunt Colleen wants at the end of it. I chose this. It was my decision, not hers." Another pause, longer this time, and when he spoke again his voice had gone flat, careful. "What do you mean, it was never really my decision to begin with?"

Nadia stopped breathing.

Through the gap in the door, she watched Damian go very still, phone pressed hard against his ear, his knuckles white around it.

"Say that again," he said quietly. "Tell me exactly what you mean by that."

Nadia's heart pounded so loudly she was certain he'd hear it from across the room. Whatever was being said on the other end of that call, it was clear from Damian's face that he was hearing it for the very first time — and that whatever certainty he'd walked into this marriage with was crumbling in real time, right in front of her.