MARA'S POV

I gave the contract to the only lawyer I trusted, which was Jess's cousin Raymond, who worked at a small firm downtown. I dropped it off at his office on Wednesday morning and he called me Thursday evening and told me it was the most airtight document he had read in a long time and that whoever drafted it was very good at making sure there were no exits that hadn't been accounted for.

"Is it fair," I asked.

"It's fair to you," he said. "Everything you told me you wanted is in there. The building suspension is filed and registered. I checked it myself. It went through the city planning office yesterday morning."

I sat down on the floor of my apartment when he said that. Not dramatically. My legs just decided they were done.

The building was protected. In writing. Filed with the city before I had signed a single thing. He had done it before the contract was even agreed to, before he had any guarantee I would sign. I didn't know what to do with that information so I just sat on the floor and stared at the wall for a minute.

"Mara," Raymond said. "You don't have to sign this."

"I know."

"There are other options. Slower ones, harder ones, but they exist."

"I know that too."

He was quiet for a moment. "The man has serious legal resources behind this. If anything goes sideways the mechanisms in this contract protect him as much as they protect you. Just go in clear-eyed."

"I'm always clear-eyed," I said.

He made a sound that was not quite agreement.

I signed the contract Friday morning, alone at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee that went cold before I finished reading through it one final time. I photographed every page and sent the copies to Raymond and then I sat there looking at my own signature on the last page and thought about my mother and then stopped because it wasn't useful anymore.

The decision was made. Now I had to live inside it.

I told Carlos on Saturday. I had rehearsed it. I had a whole version of events prepared, a clean simple story about meeting Dominic at a neighborhood meeting, about things progressing quickly. I had practiced it in the mirror like a presentation.

I lasted approximately four minutes before Carlos looked at me across the kitchen table and said, "What are you not telling me."

I modified the story. I kept the structure but softened the contract element into something that sounded more like a mutual understanding between two people who moved fast. I watched his face while I talked and I saw the exact moment he decided he didn't fully believe me and also decided he was going to let it go for now.

He didn't say much after I finished. He got up and made us both more coffee and came back and sat down and said, "Is he good to you."

"Yes," I said, which was not entirely a lie. Dominic had been fair. Fair was a kind of good.

"If he's not," Carlos said, "it doesn't matter how much money he has."

"I know."

He nodded and stared at the table and I could see him processing it, fitting it into a version of events he could accept. Then he looked up and said, "Mom would have had something to say about this."

"Mom had something to say about everything."

"Yeah," he said. And then quietly, "She would have looked him in the eye and known in thirty seconds."

I didn't say anything to that because my throat had closed up slightly and I needed a moment.

Jess showed up at the bakery Sunday morning with a bag of food and a list of questions she had clearly prepared in advance.

"Have you seen where he lives," she said.

"Not yet."

"Have you established ground rules for the living situation."

"We have a contract."

"That's not what I mean and you know it." She leaned across the counter. "I mean personal ground rules. Like no feelings."

"There are no feelings, Jess."

"Right now there aren't."

"There won't be," I said. "I know exactly what this is."

She looked at me for a long moment like she could see slightly further into me than I was comfortable with. Then she opened the bag of food and didn't push it further.

What I hadn't told Jess, what I hadn't told anyone, was that on Thursday night after I got off the phone with Raymond I had gone into the bakery alone because I couldn't sleep and because kneading dough was the only thing that quieted my head when it got too loud.

I had been there maybe an hour when I noticed something.

The small shelf unit near the back window, the one that had been leaning slightly for months because one of the brackets had pulled away from the wall, was fixed. Flush against the wall, new bracket, done properly. I hadn't asked anyone to fix it. I hadn't mentioned it to anyone. As far as I knew nobody had been in the back room except me and my part-time worker Rosa, and Rosa had been off sick all week.

I stood in front of that shelf for a long time.

Then I checked the back door lock, the one that stuck every winter and that I had been meaning to replace for two years. It turned smoothly. New mechanism. Done quietly, cleanly, without announcement.

I thought about what Dominic had said when I asked how he knew about the back entrance. *I've been here before. More than once.*

I stood in my mother's bakery in the middle of the night and felt something shift in my understanding of a man I was sure I had figured out completely.

Monday morning I pulled up outside his building with one bag and the attitude of someone who had made a decision and was not going to secondguess it every five minutes.

The doorman let me in before I even said my name.

The elevator opened directly into the penthouse and Dominic was standing in the living room on a phone call, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, talking in a low controlled voice that sounded like a conversation going badly. He looked up when I walked in and held up one finger without breaking the call.

I put my bag down and looked around. It was enormous and impeccably designed and almost completely without warmth. No photographs. No clutter. Not a single thing out of place. It looked like a showroom for a life rather than the life itself.

Behind me I heard Dominic end the call.

"That was my father," he said. Something in his voice was different. Flatter.

I turned around. His face was composed but his jaw was tight and he was looking at me like he had forgotten for a second that I was going to be here.

"I didn't know you were in contact with him," I said.

"I'm not. He contacted me."

I waited.

"He knows about the marriage," Dominic said. "I don't know how."

"How is that possible. We only signed Friday."

Dominic looked at me and for the first time since I had met him he looked like someone who didn't have the answer ready.

"That's what I'm trying to find out," he said. "And Mara." He paused. "Whatever he says to you if you encounter him. Whatever version of me he offers you. Don't believe it."

"Why."

"Because my father has never done anything without a reason," he said. "And his reasons are never good.”