Chapter 2: Five Calls

MAYA

My father never called me directly. That was simply how Richard Vance operated.

He had assistants for communication and lawyers for anything complicated and carefully worded emails for everything in between. He had called me personally three times in my life. When my mother died. When I got into Upton. When our CFO was arrested and the story was about to break publicly and he needed me to hear it from him first.

Five missed calls in four minutes meant I did not have a category for what was happening.

I called him back from the corridor, the news alert still folded in my hand.

He picked up before the first ring finished. "Maya. Where are you."

"Campus. I just saw the alert." I kept my voice level. "Talk to me."

"Someone forged communications between our firms." His voice was in the controlled register, the one he used when something very large was being held at a careful distance. "Coordinated trading on three stock positions over eighteen months. The evidence is detailed and convincing and the market is not waiting for facts. We are down fourteen percent in the first hour."

I pressed my back against the corridor wall. Students moved past me with coffee cups and backpacks and easy Tuesday morning energy and none of them knew that outside this building two companies were actively hemorrhaging.

"What is our legal position," I said.

"Strong eventually. Not fast enough to stop the bleeding." A pause that cost him something. "Marcus Cross called me this morning."

That sentence rearranged the air around me. My father and Marcus Cross communicated through lawyers and carefully maintained silence. They did not call each other. The fact that they had meant the situation had moved past the point where pride was a luxury either of them could afford.

"He called you," I said.

"We are in identical positions. The same fabricated evidence. The same market exposure. The same window closing on both of us simultaneously." His voice moved through the next words the way someone moves through something physically difficult. "We have agreed that the fastest stabilization is a public signal. Something that tells institutional investors the feud is finished and the investigation is the result of outside manipulation rather than internal collusion between our firms."

I already knew. The structure of it was visible three sentences before he said it, the way the ending of a story becomes clear when the pieces arrange themselves into the only shape they can take.

"Dad."

"A public engagement between you and Liam Cross. Six months. Controlled appearances with full contractual terms reviewed by your own legal counsel." A breath. "I would not ask this if there were another path."

I looked at the folded news alert in my hand. The timestamp. Six forty-seven. He had known before I walked into that seminar this morning. Before I sat across from Liam Cross and watched him for ninety minutes and told myself the four seconds of eye contact meant nothing and the ink blot on my page meant nothing and the way the room shifted when he spoke meant nothing.

He had known and he had sat there and said nothing and then at the end of class handed me a piece of paper and walked out.

"Liam already knew when he walked into seminar this morning," I said.

"Marcus spoke with him last night."

So he had known the entire session. Had sat across from me with full knowledge of what was coming and given me nothing, not a word, not a signal, just a folded piece of paper at the end of ninety minutes. I held that information still for a moment and examined what I felt about it.

Irritated. I felt irritated.

"Send me the contract terms," I said. "Everything goes through my lawyer before I agree to anything."

"Maya."

"That is not negotiable."

A pause. "They will be in your email within the hour."

He hung up.

I stood in the corridor for exactly thirty seconds. Then I went to cheer practice because the alternative was standing in a university hallway processing things I could not yet fully process and that was not something I was willing to do in public.

The terms arrived while I was stretching. I read them on my phone in the corner of the gym, tucked from Coach Dina's sightline, and they were exactly as cold and transactional as I expected. Six months minimum with an extension clause that no lawyer would advise me to sign. A ring from the Cross family vault. Homecoming King and Queen campaign with no defined scope. An exclusivity clause so vague it created liability in three different directions. A schedule of public appearances managed entirely by both families' PR teams with zero input from either of us.

It read like a corporate merger with a diamond attached.

I put my phone away and got through practice on muscle memory and afterward I sat on the bench outside the gym in the afternoon quiet and called the number at the bottom of the document.

Liam picked up on the second ring. "You read them."

"They need work," I said.

"Significant work," he said. No hesitation.

I paused. That was not the response I had prepared for. "I want to meet before either of us signs anything. Neutral location. Tomorrow."

"Greystone. Off campus, east side. Noon."

"I'll be there," I said.

I hung up and stared at the empty practice field.

Priya appeared from the direction of the building and dropped onto the bench beside me and handed me a granola bar without explanation, which was such a Priya thing to do that something in my chest loosened slightly.

"You look like you've been somewhere very far away all afternoon," she said.

"I've been right here."

"Your body has been right here." She looked at me sideways. "Is it the seminar situation."

"It's related to that, yes."

She was quiet for a moment. Then carefully, "Are you okay."

I looked at the practice field. The clean empty green of it in the late afternoon light. "I will be," I said.

She nodded and did not push further and we sat there while the afternoon went quiet around us and I thought about a contract in my inbox and a meeting tomorrow and a boy who had sat across from me for ninety minutes this morning knowing everything and said nothing.

The irritation was still there.

But underneath it, if I was being honest with myself, was something else I did not have a clean name for yet.

I was not ready to look at it directly.

Not yet.