chapter 3

Ellie’s POV

“Absolutely not,” my grandmother said, and slammed her rolling pin down so hard flour jumped off the counter.

“Grandma, listen to me.”

“I heard you the first time, Eleanor. You will not marry a stranger to save my bakery.”

Sophie sat between us at the kitchen table, looking back and forth like she was watching a tennis match she desperately wanted to stop.

“It’s not just the bakery,” I said. “He said he’d pay off everything. The loan on the building, the equipment debt, all of it.”

“And in exchange he owns you for a year,” my grandmother said. “No. I would rather lose this bakery than sell my granddaughter.”

“You’re not selling me, I’m choosing this.”

“Are you?” She looked at me hard, the same look she used to give me as a child when I tried to sneak dessert before dinner. “Or are you choosing it because you think it’s the only way to fix something that isn’t actually your job to fix?”

That one landed harder than I wanted it to.

I thought about all the nights I had fallen asleep at the kitchen table with a calculator and a stack of unpaid invoices, telling myself that if I could just find one more freelance job, one more way to stretch a dollar, I could keep this place afloat without ever asking anyone for help. I had always believed that if I just worked hard enough, everything would eventually balance out. Sixty days had taught me how wrong that belief could be.

I thought about all the small sacrifices that had somehow never felt like sacrifices until this exact moment, skipping nights out with Sophie to pick up an extra shift, turning down a design job in another city because I could not leave my grandmother alone with the ovens, telling myself every single time that it did not matter, that the bakery was worth more than any of it. Sitting at that kitchen table now, staring at my grandmother’s stubborn, tired face, I finally let myself admit how exhausted I actually was.

I had spent my whole life watching my grandmother work herself into the ground for this bakery. I had watched her hands crack from the cold ovens in winter, watched her turn away good offers on the building because she said this place had my grandfather’s whole heart baked into the walls. I could not watch her lose it now, not when I had a way to stop it.

“He’s not asking me to love him,” I said quietly. “Just to marry him for a year. On paper. That’s all.”

“Nothing is ever just on paper when two people live under the same roof,” my grandmother said. “I was married to your grandfather for forty two years. Paper has nothing to do with what actually happens between two people.”

Sophie finally spoke up. “Okay, both of you, breathe. Ellie, walk me through what he actually offered again.”

I explained it all again. The will. The thirty four days. The old letter between our families. Sophie listened with her lawyer brain fully switched on, asking questions I hadn’t even thought to ask.

“Get everything in writing,” she said finally. “An actual contract. Terms, timeline, an exit clause. If you’re doing this, you protect yourself first.”

“So you think I should do it?”

“I think,” Sophie said carefully, “that you’re going to do it whether any of us agree or not, because that’s who you are. So let’s make sure you don’t get hurt.”

My grandmother was quiet for a long time after that, staring down at her hands.

“He came to see me this afternoon,” she said finally. “While you were at Sophie’s.”

I sat up straight. “What? Nathan came here?”

“Mister Cross,” she corrected, though her voice had softened slightly on the name. “He sat right where you’re sitting. Very polite. Very careful with his words. He told me the same thing you just did.” She paused. “And then he told me something else.”

“What?”

“He said his grandfather always regretted that he never repaid my husband properly before he died. He said it was not a debt he intended to use for his own convenience, but one his family had carried with shame for forty years.” She looked up at me. “A man like that, cold as ice in every newspaper article I’ve ever read about him, does not come to an old woman’s kitchen to apologize unless something in him actually means it.”

I did not know what to say to that.

“I am not telling you to marry him,” my grandmother said. “I am telling you that if you decide to do this, it will not be for nothing. There is more in that man than he lets people see.”

That night I sat alone in my small apartment with the folder Nathan’s assistant had sent over, full of contract drafts and legal terms I barely understood. I read through the exit clause three times. One year. After that, either of us could walk away, debts settled, no strings attached.

My phone buzzed. An unknown number.

I answered it, heart suddenly loud in my ears.

“Miss Hartman.” His voice, low and certain, same as it had been in his office. “Have you made your decision?”

I looked at the folder in my lap, at my grandmother’s bakery reflected in every clause of that contract.

“I have one question first,” I said.

“Ask it.”

“If I say yes,” I said slowly, “what happens to you if I ever say no?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, longer than I expected.

“Then I lose everything,” he said quietly. “So I am hoping very hard that you say yes, Miss Hartman.”

I sat with the phone still warm against my ear long after he hung up, staring at the ceiling of my small apartment, listening to the radiator tick in the silence. Somewhere across the city he was probably sitting in that enormous office of his, waiting on an answer from a stranger who had spilled coffee on him four days ago. It should have felt ridiculous. Instead it felt like the only solid thing left standing in a life that had suddenly turned to sand beneath my feet.

I picked up a pen and signed my name to the first page of the contract before I let myself change my mind.