Chapter 5: The Ultimatum

The house smelled like her mother's cooking, which should have been comforting and instead just made Tia's stomach twist tighter.

Her mother only cooked like this — the good rice, the dish Tia had loved as a kid — when she was trying to soften something.

Her father was already at the dining table when she came down, laptop closed in front of him, which was its own kind of alarming. Tia had never once seen her father sit at a table without his laptop open.

"Sit," he said. Not unkind. Just final.

She sat.

Her mother came in a moment later, set down a pot of tea neither of them would drink, and sat too, hands folded in her lap like she was bracing for something.

"Is someone sick?" Tia asked, because the silence was worse than anything they could actually say. "Is it Rebecca? Is it one of you?"

"No one's sick," her father said. "This is about the company."

Tia blinked. "The company."

"You know our families have known each other for years," he said, like he was opening a meeting instead of a conversation with his own daughter. "Acquaintances. The occasional dinner, the occasional introduction."

"It wasn't until your sister married into the Hart family that it became something real — that's when the joint contracts started. That partnership is the backbone of half our current business now."

"I know that." She did — vaguely, the way you know things about your parents' work that never quite become real to you. "What does that have to do with me?"

Her mother's hands tightened around each other. "Since your sister passed, the arrangement has been... unstable."

"Unstable how?"

"The partnership was built on family," her father said. "That's how these things work at that level, Tia. Contracts on paper, trust between families underneath. Your sister marrying into the Harts was what turned a friendly acquaintance into that trust in the first place. With her gone—"

"With her gone, what?" Tia's voice came out sharper than she meant it to. "You're talking about her like she was collateral."

"That's not what I meant."

"That's exactly what you meant."

Her mother reached across the table, laid a hand over Tia's. "Sweetheart. We're not trying to be cold about this. But if the partnership dissolves, it isn't just our company that suffers. It's dozens of people who work for us. It's — " she hesitated, and something in her face cracked slightly, "— it's Rebecca."

Tia went still. "What does Rebecca have to do with any of this?"

Her parents exchanged a look. It was her father who finally said it, plainly, like ripping off a bandage was kinder than easing into it.

"Dylan Hart's mother wants him to remarry. She's made that clear to us directly. If he marries someone outside this family, the informal understanding between our companies ends — no lawsuit, nothing dramatic, just a slow, quiet withdrawal of every advantage we've built in the eleven years since Kate married in."

"And if that happens, Tia, we lose our standing with the Harts entirely. Which means we lose any say in how Rebecca is raised. Any relationship with her at all, if his mother decides that's cleaner."

"They wouldn't cut a six-year-old off from her own maternal family over a business deal."

"Wouldn't they?" her mother said quietly. "You've met his mother twice in your life. I've known her for twenty years."

"She would frame it as protecting Rebecca from complication. She has already hinted as much."

Tia felt something cold settle low in her stomach. "Okay. So what exactly are you telling me."

Her father didn't blink. "We're telling you that Dylan has agreed, if you're willing, to marry you instead."

The room went very quiet.

"I'm sorry," Tia said, "I don't think I heard that right."

"You heard it right."

"I'm twenty," Tia said. "I have one semester left of school. I just — a week and a half ago I found out my boyfriend was cheating on me because I wouldn't sleep with him, and now you're telling me you want me to marry a thirty-three-year-old widower I've met a handful of times at family dinners and barely said ten words to?"

"It's not about romance," her mother said quickly, like that made it better. "It would be a practical arrangement. To stabilize things. For everyone's sake — the company, Rebecca, even Dylan himself, who is under his own kind of pressure right now."

"A practical arrangement." Tia laughed, short and disbelieving. "You want me to marry my dead sister's husband as a business strategy."

"Don't say it like that," her father said, sharper now.

"How else should I say it? That's what it is!"

"Tia." Her mother's voice cracked, just slightly, and it was that crack — not the argument, not the business talk — that actually cut through. "I know how this sounds. I know."

"But I've watched that little girl stop talking entirely since her mother died. I've watched her flinch every time someone raises their voice, watched her stare out windows like she's waiting for Kate to come back. If this family loses access to her — if she loses the only people left who remember her mother the way we do—"

"Don't." Tia's voice shook. "Don't use her to make this okay."

"I'm not trying to make it okay," her mother said, tears finally spilling over. "I'm telling you the truth of what's at stake, because you deserve to make this choice with your eyes open, not blind."

Tia sat there, chest heaving, looking between the two of them — her father rigid and businesslike, her mother crying quietly into her own hands.

The tea sat between them, going cold, untouched.

"I need you to understand something," she said finally, standing up so fast her chair scraped hard against the floor. "I am not a merger. I am not collateral. And I am not marrying a man I barely know to save a business deal."

Neither of her parents said anything.

"I love Rebecca," Tia said, quieter now, her voice breaking on the name. "I love her so much it terrifies me. But you don't get to hand me an impossible choice and call it love just because you dressed it up in her name."

She walked out before either of them could answer, out through the front door and into the cold evening air.

Her hands were shaking so badly she had to sit down on the porch steps just to breathe.

She had no idea, sitting there, that her parents weren't finished. That the real leverage — the thing that would actually break her — hadn't even been said out loud yet.