Chapter 5: Moving To His House

Adrian

Mason's apartment was worse than I'd imagined.

It was a one-bedroom in the Sunset District, tucked into a building that looked like it had been built in the seventies and then abandoned by everyone except the landlord who still collected rent. 

The hallway smelled like old cooking oil and something vaguely floral that didn't quite mask the underlying mustiness.

Inside wasn't much better.

The carpet was beige or had been once.now permanently stained with the ghosts of previous tenants. The appliances were harvest gold and wheezed like asthmatic lungs every time the refrigerator cycled on. 

Law books were stacked everywhere on the coffee table, the kitchen counter, the floor beside the couch like legal barricades against the world. 

The furniture looked secondhand, functional but joyless.

The bathroom was so small I could barely turn around without my elbow hitting the sink.

This was where I'd be living for the next two years.

I stood in the middle of the living room with my two suitcases and felt something close to despair settle over me.

"I cleared space in the closet," Mason said, opening the bedroom door like he was showing a room to a tenant rather than a husband. 

"Two drawers in the dresser. Bathroom shelf is yours. The pullout couch is more comfortable than it looks."

I stepped into the doorway and stared at the bedroom. Mason's bedroom. The room I wouldn't be sleeping in except during immigration raids. 

The bed was neatly made with plain gray sheets. A nightstand held a lamp, a glass of water, and a book I couldn't read the title of from here. 

Everything was organized, minimal, controlled.

Something sank heavy in my chest.

"Okay."

"House rules." His voice shifted into that clipped, professional tone I was starting to recognize. The one he used when he needed distance. 

"I make coffee at six-thirty AM. If you want some, help yourself. Shared groceries go on the joint account. Personal items, you pay for yourself. Rent is twenty-two hundred a month. Utilities average another one-fifty. Your half is due on the first."

Wait.

What?

"I'm paying rent?" The words came out sharper than I meant them to, but I couldn't help it. My brain was still trying to process. "I thought the fifty thousand covered everything."

"The fifty thousand covers the arrangement." Mason's expression didn't change. Matter-of-fact. Clinical. "The marriage. 

The legal risk I'm taking. My time coaching you through interviews. It doesn't cover your living expenses. You'd be paying rent anywhere else, Adrian. This is actually cheaper than your current apartment."

He was right. I knew he was right.

My current place, the one I'd just sublet to Maya's cousin was twenty-six hundred a month for a studio barely bigger than a closet. 

Eleven hundred for half of Mason's one-bedroom was a steal by San Francisco standards.

But hearing it laid out so transactionally, so clinically, made everything feel worse. Like I wasn't just buying survival. I was leasing it month by month, payment by payment.

Like if I missed rent, he'd evict me the same way he'd dissolve our arrangement if I missed his quarterly f*e.

"Fine," I said, trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice. "What else?"

"The alarm system." Mason pulled out his phone and showed me an app I didn't recognize. "If someone approaches the door between ten PM and seven AM, we both get an alert. 

You'll have ninety seconds to get to the bedroom and make it look like we were sleeping together."

My stomach twisted.

"What does that mean exactly?"

"Mess up your hair. Take off your shirt. Look disoriented like you just woke up. Get into the bed. Look intimate."

He said it like he was reading from a manual. 

"They're checking for separate sleeping arrangements. Signs that we're performing rather than living together. We can't give them any reason to be suspicious."

"Have you ever had surprise visits?" My voice came out quieter than I intended.

"Twice. With previous clients." He pocketed his phone. "We passed both times. The key is preparation and consistency. They're trained to spot fraud, but they're also overworked and underfunded. 

If we're convincing enough, they'll move on to easier targets."

I nodded, my throat too tight to speak, and turned to unpack my life into the space he'd allocated for me.

It didn't take long.

Two suitcases. That was everything I owned that mattered. I hung my clothes in the quarter closet he'd cleared, mostly t-shirts and jeans, a few button-downs for work. 

I folded underwear and socks into the two drawers. I arranged my toiletries on the bathroom shelf next to his expensive-looking skincare products.

This was what my life had been reduced to.

Two drawers. A quarter closet. A shelf in a bathroom I'd be sharing with a stranger.

I came back out to find Mason in the kitchen, making coffee with mechanical precision. 

Every movement was efficient, practiced, no wasted motion. He measured grounds, filled the reservoir, pressed the button, all without looking. Like he'd done this exact routine thousands of times.

Everything about him felt controlled. Contained. Like he'd built himself into a fortress where nothing unexpected could get in.

I wondered what he looked like when he wasn't performing control. If he ever stopped performing at all. If there was anything soft underneath all that careful distance.

"Coffee?" he asked, and for a moment his voice almost sounded kind.

"Please."

We sat at the tiny kitchen table, barely big enough for two people and Mason pulled out a thick three-ring binder stuffed with documents and color-coded tabs. 

It looked like something from a legal case, organized and thorough.

"We need to memorize each other's lives before the USCIS interview," he said, flipping it open. 

"They'll separate us and ask invasive questions designed to catch inconsistencies. We need to be perfect."

My stomach dropped. "When's the interview?"

"I'll request an appointment for eight weeks out. That gives us time to build evidence and prepare thoroughly." He turned to a tab labeled BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION…. MASON. "Start with the basics. 

Full name?"

"Mason Alexander Cole."

"Date of birth?"

"August fourteenth, nineteen ninety-one."

"Place of birth?"

"Portland, Oregon."

He drilled me for hours.

Parents' names: Lawrence Cole and Rebecca Harper-Cole, divorced when he was twelve. 

Childhood addresses: Three different apartments in Portland before he got kicked out at sixteen. 

Education: Portland State for undergrad, UC Hastings for law school. 

Work history: public defender's office, then family law, now divorce attorney at Morrison & Associates.

Favorite foods.

 Music preferences.

Daily routines.

"What side of the bed do I sleep on?"

"Left."

"What's my coffee order?"

"Black. No sugar. No cream."

"What's my mother's maiden name?"

"Harper."

"What time do I usually go to bed?"

"After midnight. Usually around one AM."

"What's my biggest fear?"

I hesitated. We hadn't covered this. My mind went blank.

"I don't know. You never told me."

Mason went very still. His pen stopped moving. For a long moment, he just stared at the page, and I watched something shift in his expression, something raw and unguarded that he usually kept locked away.

Then, quietly: "Failing someone again. Like I failed Dmitri."

The honesty hit me like a punch to the chest. I couldn't breathe for a second.

"Mason…"

"My turn." He flipped the page like he could shut the feeling away between the papers, lock it back up where it couldn't hurt him. 

"What's your mother's name?"

We kept going.

I learned things about him that felt too intimate for strangers. That he had a scar on his right knee from a skateboarding accident when he was twelve, before everything went wrong with his family. 

That his favorite food was his grandmother's chicken adobo, the only family recipe he still made. 

That he listened to jazz when he worked late because it helped him think. That he called his estranged mother once a year on her birthday out of obligation, not affection, and the calls never lasted more than five minutes.

That he'd wanted to be a public defender, to help people who couldn't afford lawyers, until Dmitri's deportation convinced him immigration law was where he could save the most people.

He learned things about me too. That I took my coffee with cream and two sugars. That Sofia was my favorite person in the world, the only family member I could really talk to. 

That I taught myself to code at fifteen using library computers because we couldn't afford a computer at home. That I still had nightmares about Mateo's arrest, and still woke up hearing his screams sometimes.

By two in the morning, my brain felt like it was leaking out my ears. The words were blurring together. I couldn't remember if I'd said his grandmother's name was Elena or Eliana.

"That's enough for tonight," Mason said, closing the binder with a definitive snap. 

"We'll drill daily until it's second nature. You should be able to answer questions about me while half-asleep and under pressure."

He showed me how to unfold the pullout couch. It was surprisingly comfortable, actually better than the futon I'd been sleeping on in my old place. He handed me sheets and a pillow that smelled like generic detergent.

"Bathroom's yours first if you need it," he said, already heading toward the bedroom.

"Mason? I called."

He turned back, one hand on the doorframe.

"Thank you," I said quietly. "For doing this. For…for saving my life."

Something complicated crossed his face. Pain, maybe. Or regret. Or something I couldn't name.

"Don't thank me yet," he said. "We haven't survived the hard part."

Then he closed the bedroom door, and I was alone.

I lay on the pullout couch, staring at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of him moving around in the next room. Water running in the bathroom. Footsteps. The creak of the bed as he settled in for the night.

My husband.

My fake husband who I'd married to avoid deportation, who I barely knew, who held my entire future in his careful, controlled hands.

I closed my eyes and dreamed of deportation officers and customs checkpoints and a wedding kiss that had meant absolutely nothing.

Except somewhere, deep inside me, in a place I refused to examine too closely, I suspected that was a lie.