Contract of Hearts

The envelope was the color of my shame.

I stared at it across my Formica kitchen table, the pale yellow surface mirroring the single strip of afternoon sun managing to struggle through the grubby glass of my window. I didn't have to open it. I already knew what the letter inside said. St. Jude’s Medical Center’s logo was stamped neatly on the corner-the placid, healed blue that now meant everything I couldn’t have.

Final Notice.

My hand shook slightly as I picked up my coffee, long gone cold. I needed something to hold. The apartment around me was pristine; not by nature, but because over the past three years I had learned that mess was a luxury I no longer possessed. Everything was aligned. Every dirty dish was washed the moment it became dirty. Control. I held onto it like a drowning woman held onto a log. Six months ago the bill had felt manageable. An irritation, a sharp but ascendable peak. Then the graphic design firm where I worked had cut my hours. Then the second surgery had been strongly recommended. Then the interest began to multiply, creeping like frost across the glass in winter, spreading first one cold inch and then suddenly the whole pane.

I put my mug down, picked up the envelope and slipped my thumb beneath the seal.

Outstanding Balance: $247,843.62.

Payment due no later than: November 15.

Today was November 1. I exhaled slowly, closing my eyes. The number didn't scare me anymore- it had graduated from fear two months prior, settling into a kind of dull, gnawing acceptance. What did scare me was the number that sat just below it, in smaller print: Collection action will commence immediately following the due date. This may include wage garnishment, property lien and legal proceedings. Property lien. On what? The only asset of value I owned was my beat up Honda Civic in the street below and its resale value was about two thousand dollars on a decent day. Wage garnishment meant I had to have wages to garnish. I was already donating plasma twice a week to keep the electricity on. My cell phone buzzed on the table, doing a small, agitated little jig across the surface of my Formica. I glanced at the screen.

Dr Hayes' office.

She picked it up on the second ring; some things-like preparing for bad news-you did without thinking.

"Mira Delacroix?"

"Speaking."

"This is Elena from Dr. Hayes' office. We're calling to confirm your appointment for your follow-up MRI on Thursday."

A lump rose in Mira's throat. The follow-up. The one that would tell her if the drug was working, if the mass in her abdomen had shrunk, if she was looking at another six months of treatment or another surgery or- she let her mind drift away from the word, but it lingered, at the edge, patient and dreadful. "I'm going to have to reschedule," she said. Her voice was surprisingly calm considering she was lying through her teeth. "I'll call you back."

"Certainly. Just give us a call when you can."

She disconnected and placed the phone on the table next to the envelope. The two of them sat there like bookends, like two exclamation points in a sentence that hadn't been finished.

The mass was benign. That was her only blessing. It was benign but aggressive; a knot of cells that shouldn't have been where it was, pressing against her liver and right kidney. The doctors had removed the majority during the first surgery, but the margins were unclear. They now wanted to watch it, to monitor it, and if-when-it grew, to cut it out again.

Her insurance, a skeleton of the catastrophe plan she'd managed to scrape together after her father had died, paid for very little. And her father... Her father had left her nothing but questions.

Victor Delacroix had been a good man. She believed it the way she believed the sun would rise tomorrow; not because she had proof, but because the alternative was unthinkable. He had raised her alone after her mother had left when she was six. He had worked double shifts as a long haul truck driver to get her through community college. He had laughed easily, loved hard, and died suddenly of a heart attack three years ago at age sixty-two, leaving behind nothing but a storage unit full of old furniture, a partially-paid-off house that the bank had since repossessed, and a locked metal briefcase that Mira had never managed to open.

The briefcase now sat in the corner of her bedroom next to her dresser. She had tried every combination she could think of; his birthday, hers, her mother's, her parents' anniversary, the day she graduated from high school, the day she turned eighteen, her thirteenth birthday, his twenty-first. Nothing worked. Sometimes she thought about taking a crowbar to it, but something always stopped her; respect perhaps. Or perhaps fear. She wasn't sure.

A rap on the door jolted her from her spiraling thoughts. She was not expecting anyone. The landlord collected rent on the first, but he'd been by yesterday to stare and glare at her check, which was for the smallest possible amount that wouldn't result in eviction. Mail usually arrived by noon, and her neighbors were strangers at best. She rose from the table and walked across the small living room to peer through the peephole. The man standing on her doorstep looked like he'd been photoshopped into reality.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, and wearing a charcoal gray overcoat that had cost more than her car. He had dark hair and sharp features, and eyes the color of a winter sea-pale gray, cold and unreadable. He was standing there with his hands in his pockets, as though he was accustomed to doors opening for him.

Mira opened the door a few inches, leaving the chain on. "Can I help you?"

"Mira Delacroix." It wasn't a question. His voice was low and level, with an exactness of enunciation that grated on her nerves. "My name is Kieran Locke. I'd like to discuss a business arrangement with you."

The name was like a slap in the face. Kieran Locke. As in, Locke Industries. As in, a man who occasionally showed up on the covers of Forbes and Bloomberg, with headlines announcing hostile takeovers and massive charitable contributions in the same breath. As in, one of the richest men in the country, standing on her rickety porch in a neighborhood where the streetlights hadn't worked in years.

"I think you have the wrong apartment," she said, and began to close the door.

His hand moved faster than she would have expected, palm flat against the wood, stopping the door with a gentle but unyielding pressure. "You don't. Please. Just five minutes of your time."

Every nerve in her body was screaming no. Stranger danger. Rich men and their weird propositions. The kind of setup that trapped women like her-tired and alone and desperate-into no-win situations. But there was something in the carefully controlled tones that gave her pause. Not sympathy. Not kindness. Something akin to a profound weariness, deep beneath the veneer of polished confidence.

"The chain stays on," she said.

"Of course."

She opened the door to the six-inch limit of the chain and he didn't try to shove past. He didn't even lean in. He just stood there, his hands back in his pockets, and looked at her with those pale gray eyes.

"I've been following your circumstances closely for quite some time," he said.

Her stomach churned. "That's incredibly creepy."

"Not in the way that you're thinking." A brief flicker of something-annoyance, perhaps-darted across his face and was gone. "Your medical records. Your financial statement. Your father's estate. I've had my people investigate every angle of your situation."

A cold dread spread through Mira. "You've been investigating me?"

"Assessing you. There's a difference." He reached into his inner coat pocket and produced a folded piece of paper. "Your current medical bills amount to just under two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Your savings account currently contains less than four hundred. You are three months behind on your student loan payments, two months behind on your car insurance, and your landlord has been reviewing notice of non-renewal forms with a close eye at the end of your current lease term."

Each word was a pinprick. She wanted to slam the door on him, to curse him out for his audacity and his intrusion, for turning her life into a list of liabilities. But she was frozen, unable to deny the truth of his words.

"What do you want?" she whispered.

"I want to offer you a contract." He held out the paper. "A year of marriage to me. In return, I will cover all of your debts, pay for your medical treatments in full-including the pending surgery and any subsequent care-and provide you with a monthly allowance of twenty thousand dollars."

The world shifted.

Mira gripped the doorframe to steady herself. "You're crazy."

"I'm practical." His gaze never wavered. "I need a wife. Not for reasons of love-but for business. There are expectations, in my circle. A certain façade must be upheld. A single man of my status is a cause for undesirable speculation. A convenient marriage solves a multitude of problems."

"And what's in it for me, besides being your arm-candy?"

"I've already told you. Debt-free. Medical care. Financial security. At the end of twelve months, we'll divorce with amicable settlements. You'll receive the funds I've secured for you-an additional two hundred and forty thousand dollars, disbursed in a lump sum upon the fulfillment of the contract."

It was an obscene amount of money. Far more than she could earn in ten years working her current position. Enough to clear her father's debts and finally start anew with the kind of security she hadn't dared to dream of-a life where her only worry was not if she could afford her medications, but what she'd make for dinner.

It was also crazy.

"No." She shook her head, the movement jerky. "I don't know you, I don't trust you, and I'm not going to sell myself to some billionaire who thinks he can buy people the way he buys companies."

She made to close the door.

"Your father didn't die of a heart attack."

Her hand froze.

Kieran Locke's voice was low, and factual, as if he were discussing the weather. "Victor Delacroix's death certificate clearly states 'myocardial infarction.' However, his medical records-those not released to the official files- tell a different story. He was poisoned. Slowly, methodically. Over a matter of months. And the individuals responsible are currently searching for what he left behind."

She stared at him through the sliver of opening, her heart a frantic bird beating against her ribs.

"The briefcase," she managed to whisper. It wasn't a question.

"Yes." His eyes met hers, a cool, unreadable gray that held, for the briefest of moments, something that was neither warmth nor kindness. Recognition. "Your father got himself involved in something very dangerous before his death. Something that has not yet concluded. You've been left in the dark about it, but the people who killed him are aware of your existence. They've been monitoring you for months, waiting for you to reveal yourself."

"That's-" She stopped. It was insane. Paranoid. But the words caught in her throat because the knot in her stomach whispered that it was true. She’d felt it sometimes. That strange sensation of being watched. The black car that always seemed to appear just behind her as she drove home from work.

"The contract," Kieran Locke continued, his tone even, "is not merely for the purpose of appearances. It's for protection. As my wife, you will have safety, resources, and a degree of prominence that makes it impossible to harm you without attracting significant attention. I am not offering you a way out of your predicament because I am a kind man-I am not. But because your father did a great service for someone whom I hold in high esteem, many years ago. A debt I intend to repay."

She pictured the battered leather briefcase stowed away in her bedroom, the one she'd never been able to open. The secrets it contained that her father hadn't even known about.

She pictured the stark white envelope lying on her kitchen table. Eviction notice.

She pictured the ever-growing mountain of debt, the looming MRI scan, the agonizing decision of which essential medical procedure she would have to sacrifice.

"One year," she said finally, her voice hollow.

"One year."

"No emotions. No questions of a personal nature. No actual marital relationship?"

His lips curled, not quite into a smile, but close. "You've read the fine print."

"I haven't even seen the fine print."

"Then allow me inside," Kieran Locke said, his gaze steady, "so that I may show you."

For a long moment, Mira stood in the doorway of her dilapidated apartment building, the weight of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars heavy on her shoulders, and the specter of her father's murder standing behind her. She should slam the door, call the police, and run as far away from this cold, unreadable man and his chilling proposal as possible.

But she was tired. Tired of fighting this solitary war. Tired of the daily calculus of survival: skip dinner for three days to afford the antibiotics. Let the electricity go off for a month to pay the minimum on the credit card. Trying to stay strong when that strength felt like drowning.

She released the deadbolt and slipped the chain off the door.

"Five minutes," she stated. "And if you try anything funny, I have a cast-iron skillet in my kitchen, and I'm not afraid to use it."

Kieran Locke stepped over the threshold and lowered his head to avoid the rickety doorframe. He surveyed her tiny apartment-the rows of books, the struggling spider plant on the sill, the faded rug on the floor, a relic from a garage sale five years prior-and offered no comment. Yet, she saw a flicker of something in his eyes. Respect. Or perhaps, pity. She couldn't tell.

"The skillet will not be necessary," he said in a low voice. "I keep my promises, Mira. You'll learn that about me, for better or worse."

He took the chair opposite hers at her father's kitchen table-the only piece of furniture she'd salvaged from the house-and spread the contract across its cracked laminate surface. It was ten pages long, crammed with legalese, with a single blank line at the bottom, awaiting her signature.

Mira sat across from him, the envelope still open on the table, the ghosts of her father's secrets and her own desperate future pressing in on all sides.

"Tell me everything," she said, her voice raw. "Tell me about my father. About what he was doing. And why you really want to marry me."

Kieran Locke met her gaze for a long, silent moment, and then he began to speak.

Outside, the streetlights sputtered and died, plunging the neighborhood into darkness. But inside, the story of a father betrayed and a life cut short began to unfold. A story of debts owed and collected, of secrets hidden and discovered, and of a man who had tried to do the right thing and paid the ultimate price.

And at the center of it all, a metal briefcase that held the key to everything.

By the time Kieran was done talking, Mira's coffee was cold again, the sun was gone, and she was sitting in the dark with her hands folded over the table and the contract within an inch of her fingertips. "I'll need to look this over with a lawyer."

"That's already been arranged. The best lawyer in the city. She'll be here in the morning." Of course she would be. Because Kieran Locke didn't leave anything up to fate. He strategized, and plotted, and then he implemented. And now he wanted to mark her down on his books.

"A year," Mira said again, trying the words on. "And then I leave."

"And then you leave," Kieran confirmed. "No strings attached, no responsibilities, no hidden conditions." She looked at him across the table - this man with the gray eyes and the dead man's debt - and she made a decision that was going to change everything. "Fine," she said. "I'll marry you." 

The contract wasn't signed yet and the agreement was unsealed, but some

how between the two of them in the darkness, something had already begun. Not love. Not trust. Something older and harder and far more terrifying. 

A beginning.