Chapter 2 - The Debt

Ivy's POV

The estimate came back at four thousand dollars, and Roman Ashford's assistant hadn't sent it — Roman himself did.

Ivy stared at the text for a full minute before she typed back: Send me an invoice and I'll wire it today.

His reply came almost instantly. Come get coffee with me instead. We'll call it even.

She should have said no. She should have blocked the number entirely, gone back to pretending the parking lot outside the Meridian never happened, and let Julian's scandal absorb every ounce of energy she had left. Instead, at ten the next morning, she found herself sitting across from Roman Ashford in a corner café two blocks from her office, watching him not touch his espresso while she picked apart a croissant she had no intention of eating.

"You didn't come here about the car," she said.

"No." He didn't bother pretending otherwise. That was new — or maybe it wasn't new, maybe she'd just forgotten how little patience Roman had for pretending. "I did some reading last night. Your father's company. The loan restructuring with Ashford Capital three years ago."

Ivy's stomach dropped. "That's not something you get to bring up."

"It's public record."

"It's private," she snapped, lower than she meant to. A woman at the next table glanced over, and Ivy forced her shoulders back down from where they'd crept toward her ears. "My father's debts have nothing to do with you."

"They have everything to do with why you're marrying my nephew."

The croissant turned to ash in her mouth. She set it down carefully, the way she'd trained herself to do everything when she was furious — carefully, precisely, nothing that could be photographed and used against her. "I'm marrying Julian because I want to."

"Say that again and mean it."

"I mean it."

Roman leaned back, and for a moment he looked at her the way he used to — like he could see straight through every careful sentence she'd built to keep him out. It used to feel like being known. Now it felt like being caught.

"Your father owes the Ashford family eight hundred thousand dollars," he said quietly. "Restructured at a rate that would've buried him if Julian hadn't personally guaranteed it. You really want me to believe none of that factored into a ring on your hand?"

"You don't know anything about my life anymore." Her voice cracked in a way she hated. "You don't get to walk back into it after three years and decide you understand it better than I do."

"Then tell me I'm wrong." He said it simply, no triumph in it, which was somehow worse than if he'd gloated. "Tell me you'd have said yes to Julian if your father's company wasn't hanging by a thread, and I'll drop it. I'll pay for the car myself and never bring any of this up again."

Ivy opened her mouth.

Nothing came out.

Because the truth was tangled somewhere she couldn't reach fast enough to hand him a clean lie, and Roman had always been able to read a hesitation better than anyone she'd ever met. She watched it land on his face — not satisfaction, something closer to grief.

"That's what I thought," he said, and reached for his coat.

---

Roman's POV

He hadn't meant to say all of it. He'd meant to needle her a little, get under the composed PR-specialist armor she'd built since he'd last seen her, and instead he'd ended up laying out her father's finances like an accusation, and watching her face do the thing it used to do right before she cried and refused to let herself.

Good. Let her be angry. Angry was easier to be around than the alternative, which was remembering exactly how her mouth used to curve before she said his name like it meant something.

"Wait." Her voice stopped him halfway out of his chair.

He waited.

"You don't get to do that," Ivy said, quieter now, and something about the quiet was worse than the shouting. "You don't get to disappear for three years, show up because I put a dent in your car, and act like you have some claim on whether my engagement is real."

"I'm not claiming anything." He sat back down, mostly because leaving now would mean admitting she'd landed a hit, and Roman Ashford did not concede points in public. "I'm telling you I know exactly what it looks like when someone marries a debt instead of a person. I watched my own mother do it."

That got her. He saw it — the flicker of surprise that he'd handed her something real instead of another accusation.

"Roman—"

"You don't owe the Ashfords your whole life," he said again, the same thing he'd told her in the parking lot, because apparently it was the only true thing he had left to give her. "You owe us four thousand dollars for a fender, and your father owes us a loan he's already paying back on schedule. That's it. That's the whole debt. Everything else you've decided you owe is a story you're telling yourself."

Ivy's hands had gone still on the table. "Why do you care?"

He almost told her the truth. It sat right there, three years overdue — because I never stopped, because I drove past your old apartment for a year after you left, because I have spent three years pretending a version of my life that doesn't include you and I am so tired of the performance. All of it climbed halfway up his throat and he swallowed every word of it, because she was still wearing his nephew's ring, and some lines even Roman Ashford didn't cross in a café at ten in the morning.

"Because I don't like watching people get bought," he said instead. It wasn't a lie. It just wasn't the whole truth either.

Ivy studied him for a long moment — long enough that he wondered if she could tell the difference.

"I have to get back to work," she said finally, standing, gathering her bag with hands that weren't quite steady. "Julian's PR crisis doesn't manage itself."

"Ivy."

She paused at the door.

"The offer stands," Roman said. "Not the coffee. The other thing. You don't owe anyone your whole life. Not my family. Not his."

She didn't answer. But she also didn't walk away as fast as she had the night before — and as Roman watched her disappear down the sidewalk, phone already pressed to her ear, already back to managing someone else's disaster,

he found himself doing something he hadn't let himself do in three years.

He hoped.