Chapter 3: Neutral Territory

MAYA

Priya walked me halfway there without knowing it.

She had a lecture in the building two blocks from Greystone and we had the same route for most of it, which meant I spent twelve minutes navigating her observations with the focused energy she usually reserved for exam season.

"So you have a meeting," she said.

"I have a meeting."

"Near Greystone."

"Near there, yes."

"Maya." She looked at me with those careful eyes. "It's him, isn't it."

I said nothing, which she correctly read as confirmation.

She was quiet for half a block. Then, "Okay. I am not going to ask questions because you clearly cannot answer them right now and I respect that boundary completely." She paused. "I just need you to know that I am available at any hour for any level of debrief and I will not judge a single thing you tell me. Not one thing. Even if it involves a Cross."

"I know," I said.

"Even if it gets complicated."

"Priya."

"I'm just leaving the door open very wide."

"I appreciate the door," I said. "I will walk through it when I can."

She peeled off at her building with a look that contained approximately fifty unasked questions held in careful restraint, and I covered the last block to Greystone alone.

He was already there.

Corner table, back to the wall, two coffees on the table between the empty chairs. I registered three things in quick succession. The seat choice, which was the seat I would have chosen. The coffees, which meant he had asked someone what I ordered, or looked it up, either way he had done research. And the folder on the table beside him, thin but present, which meant he had come prepared.

I sat down without acknowledging the coffee.

He looked at me across the table. "You read the terms."

"My lawyer read the terms," I said. "I read the summary."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth, brief and controlled. "And?"

"The extension clause comes out entirely before I sign anything. The Homecoming requirement needs a defined scope or it becomes unmanageable. The exclusivity language is vague in ways that create liability." I set my annotated copy on the table between us. "Three problems. All fixable."

He reached into the folder and slid a single revised page across to me.

I picked it up. All three points addressed. Clean precise language that my own lawyer would have drafted. I looked up at him.

"You anticipated my objections before I made them," I said.

"The original draft was four hours of rushed work by people who were panicking. It showed." He wrapped both hands around his coffee cup. "I don't want to do this. I want to be very clear about that upfront. But if we are doing it the contract should actually function."

It was the most direct thing anyone had said to me since the story broke yesterday morning and it landed differently coming from him than I had expected.

"Why are you agreeing to it," I said. "The real reason."

He looked at me steadily across the table and I expected the redirect, the careful deflection that people with something to protect always produced. Instead he said, "My mother has MS. There is an experimental treatment program in Zurich that is producing real results. My father controls the funding through a discretionary account and he has made it clear that account's priorities depend entirely on my usefulness to him." A pause. The voice stayed level. The levelness was the tell. "If his position weakens the funding disappears. She loses access."

I looked at him.

"So this is for her," I said.

"Entirely."

I held that for a moment. Then I looked back at the document. "The ring. I want something that doesn't look like it was pulled from a family vault."

"It came from a family vault."

"Then it needs to not look like it did. A ring that reads as a family artifact reads as a transaction. If people are going to believe this it needs to look like a decision, not an assignment."

He studied me. "You've already thought through every detail."

"I think through everything. It's genuinely a problem I have."

That corner expression again, quicker this time. Gone before it landed.

I signed the last page and pushed it across. He signed beneath my name without hesitating. Then he extended his hand across the table, formal, the closing of a deal between two people who understood exactly what they were closing.

I took it. Firm, brief, and warmer than I had prepared for. I released it before it could register as anything other than a handshake.

"Ground rules," I said. "No kissing unless appearances absolutely require it. Nobody finds out it is fake, including the people closest to us. We align our stories before every public appearance." I paused. "And we stay civil. I will not perform a relationship that reads as hostile."

"Agreed." He met my eyes directly. "And nothing we learn about each other in private gets used. Whatever happens off the clock stays there."

That boundary came from someone who had thought carefully about the specific cost of letting another person get close. I recognized the architecture of it because I had built the same thing myself. "Agreed."

We stood at the same time and gathered our things with the same efficiency and I noted that too without meaning to.

He held the door. I walked through without thanking him because the contract did not require gratitude and I was not building habits it did not ask for.

Outside the air was cool and bright.

"Tuesday," he said. "We sit together in seminar from now on."

"I already assumed that," I said.

I walked back toward campus alone. The signed contract was in my bag. The warmth of a three second handshake was sitting somewhere at the edge of my awareness like a detail I had not finished categorizing.

I was two blocks from campus when my phone buzzed.

Unknown number. No contact name. I opened it.

The message was four words.

You should walk away.

I stopped on the pavement and read it again. Same four words. I looked up and down the street. Ordinary afternoon, ordinary people, nothing that looked like a source.

I screenshotted it, saved the number, and kept walking.

Someone already knew about the meeting.

Which meant someone had been watching the coffee shop.

And they had moved fast enough to warn me before I even got back to campus.

I did not walk faster. I did not look over my shoulder. I kept my pace exactly the same and my face exactly neutral and I thought about what it meant that we had signed a contract twenty minutes ago and someone was already trying to stop it.

It meant we were closer to the truth than either of us realized.

And it meant that whoever had forged those SEC emails was not finished.