Priya

# Chapter Seven: Priya

Priya was already at the corner table when Ivy got to the coffee shop the next morning, two cups already ordered, her expression somewhere between concerned and ready for battle, which was, Ivy reflected, more or less Priya's default setting whenever someone she loved was in trouble.

"Okay," Priya said, before Ivy had even sat down. "Talk. And don't give me the text version. Give me the real one."

Ivy sat, wrapped both hands around the cup Priya had ordered for her — chai, the good kind, from the place three blocks from the restaurant that Priya knew Ivy actually preferred over the coffee everyone assumed a line cook survived on — and took a breath, and started the version of the story she'd rehearsed twice now, first for her family, now for the one person who actually knew her well enough to catch her in a lie.

She almost didn't make it through the first sentence.

"His name is Julian Cade," she said. "I met him — it doesn't matter how I met him. It's fast, I know it's fast, and I need you to just —"

"Ivy." Priya set her own cup down, flat, deliberate. "I've known you for eleven years. I watched you not date anyone for two years straight after that mess with Daniel because you said, and I quote, 'I don't have the bandwidth to be surprised by a person right now.' You once told me you'd rather choose a health inspector's visit than a blind date. And now you're telling me you're engaged to a man I've never heard you mention once, in a week where your sister needs a transplant you can't afford." Priya's eyes didn't leave her face. "I love you. I'm not going to yell at you. But I need you to actually look at me and tell me what's happening, because that story does not add up, and you know it doesn't, or you wouldn't be sitting there looking like you're about to throw up into your chai."

Ivy set the cup down. Her hands weren't quite steady.

For one long moment, she considered just telling her the truth — the whole truth, the contract, the number, Clause 7.1, all of it — because Priya had never once, in eleven years, given her a reason to think she couldn't be trusted with something heavy. But Harriet's voice was still in her head, calm and precise: *the fewer people who know the exact structure of this arrangement, the safer both of you are, particularly in the early stages, before the board and the public have had time to simply accept it as fact.* And underneath that, quieter, was something that felt more like fear than caution — the fear that saying it out loud, to someone who knew her this well, would make it feel even more like the strange, precarious thing it actually was.

"I can't tell you everything," Ivy said finally, low, careful. "Not because I don't trust you. Because it's — there are parts of this that aren't only mine to tell, and it matters, a lot, that it stays quiet for now. I need you to trust me on that specifically, even though I know how unfair that is to ask."

Priya's jaw tightened. "Is he dangerous."

"No. God, no." Ivy shook her head hard enough that some of the chai sloshed over the rim. "It's not that. It's not anything like that."

"Is he married already? Is this a scam? Ivy, I swear to god, if some finance bro is running a con on you while your sister is —"

"He's not running a con." Ivy heard her own voice crack slightly on the word *con*, thinking of the glass office, the pen turning over and over in his hand, the line about his mother that hadn't sounded like a con at all, had sounded like the truest thing a near-stranger had ever handed her. "Priya. He's helping with Bea's surgery. That part is real, and it's happening, and it's going to save her life. I need you to hold onto that part, even if the rest of it doesn't make sense to you yet."

Priya went very still.

"He's paying for her surgery," she said slowly. "A man you just met a week ago is paying three hundred and — however much it is — for a surgery, and you're marrying him, and you can't tell me why."

"Yes."

"Ivy." Priya's voice had dropped, gone soft in a way that was somehow worse than if she'd kept shouting. "That's not a relationship. That's a transaction. Please, please tell me you know the difference, because from where I'm sitting, this sounds like you traded yourself for your sister's life, and I need you to tell me that's not what happened."

The words landed harder than Ivy had braced for, mostly because they weren't wrong, not entirely, and hearing someone else say the shape of it out loud made it impossible to keep pretending the shape wasn't there.

"It's not that simple," Ivy said, quiet. "I know how it sounds. I promise you, I went in with my eyes open. I negotiated my own terms — I didn't just take whatever he offered. I made sure my restaurant stays mine, no matter what happens with him. I made sure there's a real way out if I ever need one. I wasn't — " she searched for the word, "— I wasn't helpless in this, Priya. I want you to believe that part, even if you can't believe the rest yet."

Something in Priya's face eased, fractionally, though the worry didn't leave it entirely. "You negotiated terms."

"I did."

"Like — actual contract terms. With a lawyer."

"With his lawyer, and I'm getting my own to review it before anything's final." Ivy managed a small, tired smile. "I've been doing food cost calculations since I was nineteen, Priya. You think I signed something without reading every line?"

That, finally, pulled a reluctant huff of something almost like a laugh out of Priya — not real relief, not yet, but a crack in the tension that had been sitting between them since Ivy sat down.

"Okay," Priya said. "Okay. I still think this is insane. I still think there's a version of this story you're not telling me, and I'm not going to pretend that doesn't scare me a little. But I know you. I know you don't do reckless, even when everything around you is on fire — you get more careful, not less, and if you're telling me you went into this with your eyes open, I believe that part, even if I don't understand the rest of it yet." She reached across the table and squeezed Ivy's hand, hard, the way she'd done a hundred times over eleven years of burnt fingertips and bad shifts and worse breakups. "But I want to meet him. Before the wedding, whenever that is. I want to look this man in the eye myself."

"You'll meet him," Ivy said, and meant it, already dreading and anticipating in equal measure the moment Julian Cade would have to sit across from Priya's particular brand of scrutiny.

"And Ivy." Priya's voice softened further, dropping the last of its edge. "Whatever this actually is — whatever you're not telling me — I need you to promise me something. If it ever stops feeling like something you chose, if it ever starts feeling like something that's happening to you instead of something you're doing on purpose, you call me. Any hour. I don't care what the contract says about anything."

Ivy thought of Clause 7.1, of the mutual exit clause she'd fought for and won, of Julian's voice saying *I'd rather you trust that you can leave than have you stay because you feel like you can't* — and felt, for the first time since this whole strange week had started, a small, steadying warmth that had nothing to do with Julian Cade at all, and everything to do with the fact that she hadn't, in fact, gone into any of this entirely alone.

"I promise," she said, and meant that too.

Priya nodded, satisfied for now, and picked her cup back up. "Okay. Now that we've established you're not being trafficked by a finance bro — tell me what he looks like. I need something to work with here."

Ivy laughed — real, this time, surprised out of her — and, for the length of one ordinary cup of chai on an ordinary morning, let herself set the weight of the whole strange arrangement down for a few minutes, and just be a woman telling her best friend about a man whose face she hadn't quite stopped thinking about since she'd walked out of his office two days ago.