Chapter 1: The Deal She Didn't Make

Sloane

My alarm goes off at five. Not that I need it. My body wakes up at 4:58 every single morning like something is wrong. Nothing is wrong. I just forgot how to sleep like a normal person somewhere between my second year of law school and now and I don't think I'm getting it back.

By six I'm at my desk. Coffee sitting there getting cold like always. I make it every morning and I forget it every morning and then I drink it cold because I'm not stopping to heat it up. Three case files open. The Alderman deposition is at nine and I've read the prep notes so many times I basically wrote them from memory at this point but I'm reading them again anyway. That's just how I am. That's always been how I am.

My phone went off at 6:43.

Unknown number. No area code I recognized. I get those sometimes and I almost never pick up. I don't know what made me pick up that one. I wish I hadn't. I really wish I hadn't.

"Sloane."

Just my name. One word.

And my whole chest locked up.

Eighteen years. Eighteen years and one word and my body just knew. Like something I'd buried so deep I forgot it was there suddenly had a pulse again. I hate that. I genuinely hate that your body just keeps information your brain decided to throw away.

"Don't hang up," he said.

I should have hung up.

"Thirty seconds," I said. "Talk."

He talked.

I sat at my desk with my cold coffee and my prep notes and I listened to Gerald Mercer's voice for the first time in eighteen years. He talked about a business deal that went wrong in 2019. A loan he couldn't pay back. Interest climbing for five years while he just kept hoping it would somehow fix itself. And then he said two words that made everything in me go very very still.

Rowe Industries.

Everyone in corporate law knows Rowe Industries. You cannot work in New York and not know them. They don't advertise. They don't need to. They just move into spaces and take them over completely and quietly and by the time anyone realizes what happened it's already finished.

"How much," I said.

He told me.

I pressed my hands flat on my desk and held them there.

"Mom's house," I said.

"It's collateral."

I didn't say anything for a second. Just sat there.

My mother's house on Prescott Street. The one she refused to sell even when the roof was bad and the heating kept failing and I offered to help her move somewhere better three different times. She always said no. She said she earned it. She said it was hers.

She had no idea what he'd done with it.

"There's a way to fix this," he said.

"I'm sure there is."

"The Rowe family. They proposed something. An arrangement."

Something cold went through me. I don't know how else to describe it. Just cold.

"What kind of arrangement," I said.

He went quiet.

"Gerald." Not dad. Never dad again. "What kind."

"A marriage," he said. "Between you and Beckett Rowe."

I put the phone down after that. Not hung up. Just put it face down on my desk and sat there staring at the wall for a while.

He asked me to meet him at a cafe near his hotel and I went because I don't know why I went. Maybe I needed to see his face when he said it. Maybe I needed to confirm that this was actually real and not some horrible dream I was having at my desk.

He was already there when I walked in. Sitting near the back. Both hands around his coffee mug. He looked old. That hit me first before anything else. Just old and thin and grey at the temples and so much smaller than the man I remembered from when I was nine. He stood up when he saw me and I had this weird flash of a memory, him doing the same thing at our kitchen table years ago, this automatic thing that meant nothing then and means nothing now.

I sat down across from him. Bag next to me. I looked at him the way I look at opposing counsel when I already know they're about to waste my time.

"You look like her," he said.

"Don't do that." My voice came out quiet. We were in public. "Fifteen minutes. I have a deposition at nine."

He told me everything again. In person this time which was worse. Watching his face while he said it. The deal. The loan. The interest stacking up for years while he kept telling himself he'd handle it before it got bad.

It got bad.

Three years my mother's house had been sitting there as collateral. Three years she'd been living in it not knowing. Fixing things. Planting tomatoes along the back fence. Repainting the kitchen last spring. Just living her life in a house that wasn't fully hers anymore because of something he did without telling her.

"The arrangement," I said. "Tell me exactly what it involves."

A marriage. Minimum six months. Probably longer. I attend events with Beckett Rowe. I present as his wife publicly. I do what the arrangement requires. In exchange the debt disappears. The house is released. Clean and done.

"And if I refuse," I said.

He looked at his coffee. "They move on the property in thirty days."

I sat there.

Then I picked up my bag.

"Send me every document," I said. "Today."

"Sloane—"

"I'm not agreeing to anything. Send the documents."

I walked out. Got about half a block and just stopped on the sidewalk. People going past me, that New York thing where everyone has somewhere to be and no one looks at you. I stood there in the middle of all of it.

My father came back after eighteen years to hand me a catastrophe and ask me to clean it up.

And the part that was eating me alive was that I was already trying to figure out if I could.

The documents arrived at 11:30.

I read every page twice. Sandwich untouched next to me. Door closed. By the time I finished I leaned back in my chair and looked at the ceiling.

The numbers were real. Every single one of them. The collateral clause was airtight. Rowe Industries had the legal right to move on my mother's property in thirty days if nothing changed. Thirty days.

She still didn't know.

I opened my laptop and typed Beckett Rowe into the search bar.

Results filled the screen immediately.

Thirty two years old. CEO of Rowe Industries since he was twenty eight when his father stepped back. Worth more than I was comfortable calculating. Almost never photographed at social events. The pictures that did exist were all the same energy. Controlled. Closed. Like someone who decided very early that other people didn't get to know what was happening inside him.

One photo kept showing up across different articles. Outside what looked like a courthouse. Dark suit. Looking at something off camera. Expression that gave away absolutely nothing.

I stared at it.

Then I called Dara.

She picked up on the second ring. "I've been waiting. You had your bad news face when you came back this morning."

"My father wants me to marry Beckett Rowe."

Silence.

Then. "Say that one more time."

"You heard me."

"Beckett." She said it carefully. "Rowe Industries Beckett Rowe. The one who bought Harfield Corp and had it completely restructured in forty eight hours."

"Yes."

More silence.

"Are you going to do it?" she asked.

I looked at my mother's address sitting there in plain black text on the collateral page. Her street. Her house number. Just sitting there like it was nothing.

"I don't know yet," I said.

I was lying.

Not to Dara. To myself.

Because something in my chest had already started working through it and I hated every single answer it kept landing on.