Chapter Four

I didn't get a doorbell. A suited assistant met my car in the driveway before I'd even shut off the engine and walked me straight through the house without asking my name, like he already knew exactly who I was and exactly how urgent this had become.

The study he led me to smelled like old paper and cedar, the kind of room built to hold decisions bigger than the people making them. Desmond sat at the far end of a long table with his hands folded, the same table, I'd learn later, where the original trust had been signed two generations ago. Callum stood by the window with his arms crossed, looking at absolutely nothing outside it. And a gray-suited man I didn't recognize was already sliding a folder into position before I'd fully sat down.

"Thank you for coming on short notice, Ms. Bellamy. Arthur Voss, counsel for the family trust." He didn't offer his hand, and he didn't wait for me to settle in before he kept going. "I'll get straight to it. The wedding needs to happen within the original window, not after it. The trust doesn't extend deadlines for family tragedy. It only extends them for compliance."

I stared at him for a long moment before I trusted myself to say anything at all.

"I understand this is happening fast," Desmond said, gentler than his lawyer, though it didn't make the words land any softer. "I wish I could offer you time to consider it properly. I can't."

"You want me to marry your son in two days."

"I want to save a company two families built from nothing." Desmond's voice caught slightly on the word nothing, and for a second he looked less like a chairman and more like a man watching everything he'd spent his life protecting slip through his fingers in real time. "If the marriage doesn't happen inside the original window, the trust dissolves. Automatically. No board vote, no appeal. Meridian gets sold to whoever's circling, and every family that's ever depended on this company for a paycheck finds out about it in a press release."

"That includes your parents," Voss added, not unkindly, which somehow made it worse. "Their shares are tied to the same structure. A dissolution doesn't distinguish between Ashford holdings and Bellamy holdings, Ms. Bellamy. Everyone loses proportionally."

"My parents didn't sign up to lose everything because Ivy's engagement fell apart."

"No," Desmond said quietly. "Neither did I. But here we are."

"Does Ivy know you're offering her spot to me right now."

"Ivy is being informed separately," Desmond said, and something about the careful way he said it told me the conversation happening in some other room of this house was probably not going well either.

"And my parents?"

"Your father's been informed of the broader situation. Not the specifics of this meeting." Desmond's eyes softened slightly. "I imagine you'll want to be the one to tell him the rest yourself."

I thought about my father's face at the dinner table two nights ago, the quiet, steady way he'd looked at me like he already suspected something was coming for both of us, and felt something in my chest tighten at the thought of being the one to confirm it.

I sat back in my chair, my pulse loud enough that I was fairly sure everyone in the room could hear it. "There has to be another way. Adoption, some other clause, anything."

"There isn't." Callum's voice, for the first time since I'd walked in. He hadn't turned from the window. "Believe me, I asked the same question three times last night."

"You could have said no."

"I could have." Now he did turn, and something in his face was harder than I'd ever seen it, tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. "So could you. Nobody's forcing either of us at gunpoint. We're just the two people standing closest to the only door left open."

"That's not the same as choosing it."

"No," he agreed. "It's not." He held my gaze a second longer than the conversation strictly required, like he was waiting for me to argue further, and when I didn't, something in his shoulders dropped, not relief exactly, more like a man setting down a weight he'd been carrying since the moment he walked into this study. "For what it's worth, I don't like this any more than you do."

"That's not actually worth much right now."

"No," he said again. "I didn't think it would be." Something passed over his face then, quick and almost human, before he shut it away again and turned back toward the window like the view had suddenly become interesting.

Something about the flatness of his voice made the whole room feel colder than it already was. Desmond cleared his throat, glancing between us like a man watching two negotiations happen at once and only fully understanding one of them.

"I know this isn't what either of you pictured for yourselves," he said. "I'm not asking you to pretend otherwise. I'm asking you to consider what happens to everyone standing behind you if you don't."

"And if I do it," I said, "what happens to me. Specifically. Not the company. Me."

Desmond looked, for the first time all afternoon, genuinely uncertain how to answer that.

I thought about my parents, about the studio I'd built without a cent of Ashford or Bellamy money behind it, about the version of my life that had existed exactly forty-eight hours ago, one where none of this had anything to do with me.

"If I say yes," I said slowly, "what does that actually look like. My studio, my name, any of it."

"Your professional life stays entirely your own," Voss said. "The trust has no interest in your business. You'd retain your name if you chose, though public documents would list you as Mrs. Ashford for the marriage's legal standing."

"And after. Once whatever this is, is over."

"That depends entirely on the second clause."

"What second clause."

Voss opened the folder in front of him, sliding a single page across the table like he'd been waiting the entire meeting for exactly this question. "The trust doesn't recognize marriage alone as fulfillment of the obligation." He said it plainly, the way he'd probably said far worse things in far calmer rooms, sliding a second page beside the first, dense with clauses I'd need a lawyer of my own just to properly parse. "It requires verified issue of the marriage. A biological heir, conceived and confirmed, within thirty days of the ceremony."

I heard the words. I understood every single one of them individually. It took my brain a full three seconds to assemble them into something that made sense, and when it did, I looked up at Callum, who was watching me with an expression I couldn't read at all, and then at Desmond, whose careful, apologetic silence told me everything Voss's clinical phrasing hadn't quite managed to.

"Thirty days," I repeated.

"Thirty days," Voss confirmed. "Starting the moment you sign."

I sat with that for a second, turning it over, cataloguing everything it actually meant underneath the flat legal language. Not a marriage I could quietly walk away from in a year once the paperwork settled. Not a business arrangement I could manage from a careful, sensible distance. An actual, physical, unavoidable thirty-day countdown, witnessed and verified by people who would never once ask whether I wanted it, and every single person in that room, including the man I was apparently expected to share it with, was watching to see whether I'd flinch.

Nobody in the room said anything for a long moment. Somewhere down the hall, faint but unmistakable, I could hear my mother's voice raised in argument with someone, and Ivy's voice rising to meet it. Then the study door flew open hard enough to hit the wall behind it, and Ivy stood in the doorway, mascara streaked, chest heaving like she'd run the entire length of the house to get there.

"You are not doing this," she said, looking straight at me, ignoring Desmond, ignoring Callum, ignoring everyone else in that room like they didn't exist. "You are not marrying him and pretending this is somehow fine, Odessa. Not you. Not like this."