The Number

# Chapter One: The Number

Ivy Reyes was elbow-deep in a case of San Marzano tomatoes when her phone started buzzing against the steel prep table, and she almost let it go to voicemail, because it was six-forty on a Tuesday and the ticket rail already had four orders hanging off it and Marco needed the bolognese finished before the seven o'clock reservations started walking in.

Then she saw the caller ID. *NewYork-Presbyterian — Cardiac.*

She wiped her hands on her apron so fast she nearly took skin off with the towel.

"This is Ivy."

"Ms. Reyes, this is Dr. Wilson's office calling about your sister's file." A pause, the particular kind of pause Ivy had learned to dread over the last four months — not a bad-news pause exactly, but a *getting-ready-to-say-something-that-changes-things* pause. "Dr. Wilson would like you and your sister to come in tomorrow if at all possible. We have some updated numbers from her last echo."

"Updated how?"

"I really can't get into specifics over the phone, but I don't want you to worry unnecessarily tonight. Ten a.m., if you can make it work."

Ivy said she'd make it work, because that was the only answer she knew how to give anymore, and she hung up and stood very still in the walk-in doorway with the cold air rolling out around her ankles until Priya clocked her face from across the kitchen and mouthed, *you good?*

She wasn't. But she nodded anyway, because there were four orders hanging and a bolognese to finish, and Ivy Reyes had gotten very good, this year, at doing the next necessary thing instead of the thing she actually felt like doing, which right now was sitting down on the walk-in floor among the lettuce crates and not moving for a while.

---

Bea's heart had been failing, slowly and then not slowly, since February.

It had a name — restrictive cardiomyopathy, a phrase Ivy had said so many times now that it had stopped sounding like words and started sounding like a rock she carried in her mouth — and it had a timeline, and the timeline had gotten shorter twice already since the spring. The first cardiologist had talked about medication and monitoring. The second had used the word *transplant* like it was a weather forecast, mild and inevitable. The third, Dr. Wilson, was the one who'd finally said, gently, that they should stop waiting for insurance appeals to work out and start planning for the number.

The number was $340,000, after everything the insurance would and wouldn't cover, after the co-pays and the anti-rejection drugs and the recovery care Bea would need for months afterward. Ivy had a number in her head so often now that she thought about it the way other people thought about a song stuck in their head — present, uninvited, humming under everything else she was doing.

She had eleven thousand dollars saved. She'd sold her car. Her mother had taken a second evening shift cleaning offices in Midtown three nights a week, on top of her hospital admin job, and came home smelling like industrial lemon cleaner and looking ten years older than she had at New Year's.

It wasn't enough. It wasn't going to be enough, not on the timeline Dr. Wilson was suddenly, urgently asking them to come in and discuss.

Ivy finished the bolognese. She plated the four orders. She did not think about the number, except in the way you don't think about a knife wound, except by feeling it the entire time.

---

She got home a little after midnight to the apartment in Woodside she still shared with her mother and, when Bea wasn't crashing at a friend's or too tired to make the trip back from her own place in Sunnyside, with Bea too. The lights were off except the one over the stove that her mother always left burning, a small yellow square in the dark kitchen like something out of a memory Ivy hadn't had yet.

She didn't sleep much. She lay on top of her covers in her work clothes and did math in her head that she already knew the answer to, the way you keep checking a lock you've already checked.

At six a.m., her phone rang again. Not the hospital this time — a number she didn't recognize, area code 917, too early for anyone she knew to be calling with good news.

"Is this Ivy Reyes?" A woman's voice, brisk, professional, faintly amused at something Ivy wasn't in on. "My name is Harriet Voss. I'm an attorney. I represent an estate here in Manhattan, and I have a proposal I'd like to discuss with you — one I think you'll want to hear, given your sister's situation."

Ivy sat up so fast the room tilted.

"How do you know about my sister."

"I know a great many things, Ms. Reyes, most of them entirely legal to know. I'd rather explain in person than over the phone at six in the morning — I do apologize for the hour, but this is somewhat time-sensitive on my end. Are you free this afternoon?"

Every instinct Ivy had — every instinct that had kept her upright and moving through four months of hospital corridors and worse phone calls than this one — told her this was a scam, or a lawsuit, or some kind of predatory loan scheme dressed up in a nice voice. New York was full of people who smelled desperation on families like hers and circled.

"What kind of proposal."

"The kind that solves your sister's financial problem entirely, in exchange for something that will cost you considerably less than you'd think." A pause — that same *getting-ready-to-say-something* pause the doctor's office had used the night before, except this one had a smile in it somewhere. "Two o'clock. I'll text you the address. Bring nothing but yourself, Ms. Reyes. I promise this isn't what it sounds like."

"It sounds like a scam."

"It's stranger than a scam," Harriet Voss said, and hung up before Ivy could ask what that meant.

---

Ivy told herself all day that she wasn't going to go.

She told herself this while she caught two hours of sleep sitting up on the subway to the hospital, where Dr. Wilson delivered the updated numbers — Bea's ejection fraction had dropped again, the transplant window had narrowed from *within the year* to *within four to six months* — with the kind of careful, rehearsed calm doctors use when they need you to understand something is serious without understanding it as a death sentence, which was somehow worse than if he'd just said the word.

She told herself this while Bea, sitting on the exam table in a paper gown looking somehow both twenty-two and about nine years old at the same time, asked, in a small voice, whether they were going to be okay for the money, and Ivy said *yes, obviously, don't worry about that* with a conviction she did not feel even slightly.

She told herself this all the way to the address Harriet Voss had texted her — a glass tower in Midtown, forty floors of somebody else's money stacked up against the sky — and then she found herself in the lobby anyway, at 1:57 p.m., because the truth was she had run out of other options weeks ago and was too proud, and too scared, to admit it out loud to anyone but herself.

---

Harriet Voss turned out to be a sharp-featured woman in her fifties with reading glasses pushed up into iron-gray hair and the unhurried manner of someone who had never once in her career needed to raise her voice to get what she wanted. Her office was on the thirty-first floor, all glass and quiet, with a view of the city that made Ivy's stomach do something complicated.

"Thank you for coming," Harriet said, and gestured Ivy into a chair across from her desk. "I'll be direct, because I suspect you don't have patience today for anything else. I represent the estate of a client — deceased eight months ago — whose will contains an unusual stipulation. His son must be legally married, and remain married for a minimum term, in order to retain control of the family's company. Otherwise, controlling interest passes to a family trust that neither my client's son, nor frankly I, believe should be running it."

Ivy blinked. "Okay."

"My client's son is, understandably, not interested in a conventional courtship on a court-mandated timeline. He requires a wife. A real, legal marriage — cohabitation, appearances maintained, a defined term — but not a real romance. A transaction, cleanly structured, generously compensated, with clear boundaries protecting both parties."

"You're asking me to marry a stranger."

"I'm asking you to consider it," Harriet said, unbothered. "I did my research before I called you, Ms. Reyes. You're twenty-seven, no criminal record, no debts beyond what any working New Yorker carries, employed, responsible, discreet — you told no one but immediate family about your sister's condition, which tells me you know how to keep something private when it matters. And you need, specifically, three hundred and forty thousand dollars in the next several months, which is a number I happen to know precisely, because it's the number my client's son is prepared to offer for a two-year arrangement."

The number sat in the air between them. Ivy's own personal ghost, spoken aloud by a stranger in a glass office, made suddenly, horribly concrete.

"Why me," Ivy said, when she trusted her voice again. "You said you did research. Why not — I don't know. Somebody who already knows him. Somebody in his world."

"Because everybody in his world wants something from him already, and he knows it, and he'd spend the next two years waiting for the other shoe to drop." Harriet folded her hands. "You caught his attention through an entirely unrelated connection — your restaurant catered an investors' dinner he attended in the spring, and, as I understand it, you sent back a plate of risotto to the kitchen because the chef had oversalted it, in front of forty finance executives, without knowing or caring who any of them were. He mentioned it to me, unprompted, months later, when I began compiling a list of candidates. That's not nothing, Ms. Reyes. That's a person who doesn't perform for a room. That was, apparently, memorable."

Ivy had genuinely forgotten about the risotto. She remembered being furious about the salt, not about who'd been sitting at table six.

"I'd need to meet him," she said, because some part of her brain that was still functioning underneath the panic had apparently already decided this wasn't a no. "Before I agree to anything. I want to see who I'd actually be marrying."

Harriet smiled for the first time — small, genuine, faintly relieved. "I'd expect nothing less. He's expecting you at four."

"Today?"

"Ms. Reyes," Harriet said, standing, already reaching for her phone to text a car, "your sister has four to six months. I don't believe either of you can afford for me to be a patient woman about this."

Ivy stood too, her legs unsteady in a way that had nothing to do with the height of the building.

"What's his name," she asked. "The son."

Harriet held the office door open for her, and there was something in her face — not quite a warning, not quite an apology — that Ivy wouldn't fully understand the weight of for months.

"Julian Cade," she said. "I'll let him tell you the rest himself."