Chapter 2: The Summons

AMARA’S POV

Five years is long enough to build a life out of the wreckage of an old one, if you're careful and a little lucky. I had been both.

I worked as a receptionist at a small architecture firm two cities over from where I'd grown up, close enough to still call the country home but far enough that no one there had reason to think of me. My best friend, Kally, had let me sleep on her couch for the first six months after I left my father's house, and somewhere in the years since, "her couch" had quietly become "our apartment”… two names on the lease, two mugs always in the drying rack, a life built small and safe and entirely my own.

I didn't talk about the twins. Not to Kally, not to anyone. I'd built a wall around that year of my life brick by brick, and I visited it only late at night, when I let myself wonder what a five-year-old walk looked like, what their laugh sounded like, whether they had my eyes or a stranger's. I didn't have names for them. I'd asked, once, at the clinic before they were born, and been told gently that it wasn't information I was entitled to. I'd never pushed harder than that. Pushing harder would have meant admitting how much I still wanted to know.

I told myself the wall was working. Most days, it was.

The message came on a Tuesday, an unremarkable day I'd otherwise have forgotten entirely. A neighbor from my old street, someone who'd known my mother before she died, had tracked down my number through a cousin of a cousin, and the voicemail she left was breathless with urgency.

*"Amara, it's your father, he's very sick, they're saying his heart isn't strong, you need to come. Whatever's between you two, this might be the last chance."*

I sat with my phone in my hand for a long time after that, turning the message over. My father had never once, in five years, tried to find me. I'd left in the night with nothing but a packed bag and never looked back, and the silence between us had felt less like an ending and more like a mutual agreement neither of us had bothered to sign.

But he was still my father. And however badly things had ended, I couldn't shake the thought of my mother, of arriving too late a second time, of another door I hadn't walked through in time to say the things that mattered.

Kally didn't want me to go alone. "Let me come with you," she said, already reaching for her coat.

"I need to do this myself," I told her, though I wasn't entirely sure that was true. I only knew that whatever waited for me back home, I didn't want anyone watching my face while I found it.

The house looked smaller than I remembered, the way childhood homes always do. The paint was newer, though, a fresh coat over the same old walls, and the car in the driveway was far nicer than anything my father had ever been able to afford on his own. I noticed both things and filed them away without understanding yet what they meant.

He was sitting up in bed when I arrived, propped against pillows, looking older but nowhere near as fragile as the voicemail had implied. There was color in his face. There was, if I looked closely, something almost like satisfaction in his expression when he saw me standing in the doorway.. not the relief of a dying man reunited with his daughter, but the look of someone whose plan had just clicked cleanly into place.

"You came," he said.

"I was told you were dying."

"I was told a lot of things could get you through that door," he said, and didn't so much as blink at his own admission.

That was when the study door opened behind me, and a man I'd never seen before stepped into the room, tailored suit, unreadable expression, the particular stillness of someone used to being obeyed rather than liked. He introduced himself as a lawyer representing an associate of my father's, and it was only as he began speaking that the shape of the trap finally came into focus around me.

My father's small business, the one that had barely survived on his temper and bad decisions my whole childhood was drowning in debt to a much larger company. A merger had been proposed, one that would clear every debt he owed and hand him more money than he'd ever seen in his life, on one condition.

His daughter would marry the grandson of the man he owed everything to.

"You can't be serious," I said, though the lawyer's face told me exactly how serious he was.

My father didn't meet my eyes. "It's a good deal, Amara. Better than you deserve, considering you ran off for five years and left me to deal with everything alone."

I laughed a short disbelieving sound with no humor in it at all. "You beat me the last time I stood in this house."

"And you're standing in it again," he said, as if that settled something. As if my presence here was proof I'd forgiven him rather than proof I'd been lied to.

The lawyer, unbothered by the exchange, slid a folder across the small table beside the bed. Photographs. A name I didn't recognize ‘Adrien Morretti’ attached to a company I'd never heard of, though the numbers listed beneath his name made it clear exactly how far above my world he existed. There was a contract inside the folder too, already drawn up in language too dense to fully parse in the moment, though the shape of it was plain enough: marriage, a fixed term, an exchange of money that would settle my father's debts and secure the merger neither man across from me particularly cared whether I wanted any part of.

"He's not doing this for love, if that's your concern," the lawyer said, with the faint, clinical courtesy of someone delivering a fact rather than an insult. "Mr. Morretti requires a wife for reasons of his own. This arrangement suits everyone."

Everyone except me, I thought, though I didn't say it, because some old, tired part of me already understood how little that would matter.

"And if I refuse?"

My father's face answered before the lawyer could. Something hard and cold settled into his features, the same look I remembered from every night he'd come home angry and looking for somewhere to put it. "Then I lose everything I have left, and it's your fault. Same as everything else."

I sat very still, the folder open in my lap, a stranger's photograph looking back at me, a man with dark, unreadable eyes and the kind of expression that’ll make you want to look away first. I didn't know his face. I had no reason to.

I had no way of knowing, sitting in that room with my father's debts spread across my lap like a verdict, that I was looking at a photograph of him. That the man in this folder, the man my father was selling me to, was the same man whose children I had carried and given away five years earlier without ever learning his name.

I only knew that I was cornered, and that the money on that page would clear a debt I hadn't caused and free a father who'd never once tried to free me from anything.

"I need time to think," I said.

"You have until tomorrow," the lawyer replied, already closing his own copy of the folder, already certain of my answer before I'd given it.

I left the house that night the way I'd left it five years before, quietly, with nothing settled, carrying more than I understood how to hold. Only this time, I already knew I would say yes. I had known it, if I was honest with myself, from the moment the folder opened in my lap.

I just didn’t know who I was going to marry yet.