CHAPTER 4: THE DECISION

Temi didn't sign anything that night.

She took the folded sheet of paper home instead, tucked into her clutch next to a lipstick she never used and a hotel key card for a room she was never going to sleep in, and rode the subway back to Harlem with her heels in her hand and her bare feet cold against the floor of the train car. Nobody looked at her twice. New York had seen stranger things than a woman in a bridesmaid dress riding the 2 train alone at midnight, mascara smudged, staring at nothing.

Her apartment, when she finally got there, smelled like the candle she'd forgotten to blow out that morning and the leftover pad thai she hadn't finished last night. Temi sat down at her kitchen table without turning on the overhead light, just the small lamp in the corner, and unfolded Adrian's paper for the first time since the bar.

The terms were simpler than she expected. A marriage, minimum one year. A confirmed pregnancy within a defined window, with medical intervention available if needed, though the paper didn't spell out exactly how that part would work and Temi suspected that was intentional, a conversation for later, not for a page anyone else might read. A settlement figure at the bottom that she read three times because the number didn't seem real the first two.

It would clear the lease. It would clear the two junior salaries she was about to have to cut. It would let her buy the building outright instead of renting it, if she wanted, instead of watching some landlord's nephew turn it into luxury condos the second her lease expired, which was exactly what had happened to the last three studios she'd worked out of before this one.

It would also mean marrying a man she'd met twice, carrying his child, and standing next to him in public pretending to be something she wasn't for at least a year of her life.

Her phone buzzed. Pri, this time, not a text but an actual call, which from Pri meant something had reached the level where typing wasn't fast enough.

"Please tell me you're okay," Pri said the second Temi picked up. "I've called eleven times. I saw the story get deleted and then I saw nothing and I have been sitting here assuming the worst for two hours."

"I'm okay. I'm home."

"Did they find Camille?"

"She texted me. She's safe. She just couldn't go through with it."

Pri exhaled hard enough that Temi could hear it through the phone. "Okay. Okay, that's good, that's a person being safe, that matters more than a wedding. I'm still furious at her for scaring us like that, but she's safe, that's the headline." A pause. "You sound weird. What aren't you telling me?"

Temi looked down at the paper still sitting open on her kitchen table, Adrian's neat, careful handwriting filling in the blank lines where a lawyer would normally have typed something colder.

"Adrian wants to marry me instead," she said.

The silence on the other end of the line lasted so long Temi checked to see if the call had dropped.

"I'm sorry," Pri said finally. "I need you to say that sentence again, slower, because I think my brain autocorrected it into something insane."

"There's a clause in his grandfather's will. He has to be married with a baby on the way within sixty days or he loses the company to his father. He needs a wife. He offered me a contract. Marriage, a year minimum, a settlement at the end that would fix everything, the lease, the studio, all of it."

"Temi."

"I know."

"Temi, that is the plot of a book. That is not a thing that happens to real people at midnight on a Tuesday."

"I know," Temi said again, quieter this time, because saying it out loud to Pri made it feel more real than reading it silently ever had.

"What did you tell him?"

"Nothing yet. He said take my time. Within reason." Temi ran her thumb along the edge of the paper, feeling the slight indent where his pen had pressed too hard on one line, like he'd hesitated there and started over. "Pri, I looked at the settlement number. It's not close. It's not almost enough. It would clear everything. The lease, the two salaries I've been trying to figure out how to cut without telling you, the equipment loan, all of it, gone, plus enough left over to actually grow instead of just survive."

"You were going to cut Malik and Dara without telling me?"

"I was going to tell you next week. After I figured out if there was any other way."

Pri went quiet again, and Temi could picture her exactly, sitting on the edge of her own bed across town, chewing on the end of a pen the way she did whenever a problem got too big to pace off. "This isn't just about the money though. Is it. You're actually considering the rest of it. The marriage. The baby."

"I don't know," Temi admitted, and it was the most honest thing she'd said all night. "I keep trying to find the version of this where I say no immediately, where it's obviously insane and I laugh about it with you over wine next week. And I can't quite get there. Every time I try, I think about the lease notice sitting in my desk drawer, and I think about how tired I am of building something with both hands and watching someone with more money than sense decide whether I get to keep it."

"He's not just someone with more money than sense though, is he. He's Camille's ex fiancé from four hours ago."

"I know how it sounds."

"I don't think you do, actually, because if you did you wouldn't sound this calm about it." Pri's voice softened, the teasing edge dropping out of it entirely. "Temi. Talk to me honestly. Is any part of this about him? Not the money. Him."

Temi thought about the way Adrian had looked at her in that dim booth, stripped of the composure he wore like armor everywhere else, asking her to consider something insane like it was the only reasonable option left in a world that had stopped giving him reasonable ones. She thought about the muscle in his jaw, the careful, deliberate way he'd said I know when she brought up the child like it wasn't just a line item, like some part of him understood exactly how much he was asking.

"No," she said, too quickly, and heard how unconvincing it sounded the second it left her mouth.

"Temi."

"It's not about him," Temi said again, firmer this time, mostly to herself. "It's about the studio. It's about not losing the one thing I've built that's actually mine. That's all this is."

Pri didn't argue, which somehow felt worse than if she had.

"Whatever you decide," Pri said instead, "I'm with you. You know that. But if you're going to do this, you read every single word of that contract with an actual lawyer before you sign anything, not the version his family's lawyer hands you. Promise me that much."

"I promise."

They talked for another twenty minutes, mostly about nothing, Pri circling gently back to ordinary things, a client meeting tomorrow, a supply order that hadn't arrived, anything to give Temi's mind somewhere else to rest. By the time they hung up, it was nearly two in the morning, and Temi sat alone at her kitchen table with the paper still in front of her, the small lamp throwing long shadows across the settlement number at the bottom of the page.

She picked up her phone one more time before bed and typed out a message to Adrian, her thumb hovering over send for almost a full minute before she finally let it go.

I'll meet with your lawyer. No promises yet. But I want to hear the real terms.

The reply came back faster than she expected, like he'd been sitting awake waiting for exactly this.

Tomorrow morning. My office. I'll send the address".

Temi set the phone down, turned off the lamp, and sat alone in the dark for a long time before finally going to bed, no closer to sle

ep than she'd been standing at the altar four hours ago, watching her best friend run.