Page One

The message sat on her phone for four minutes before Imogen stopped reading it and started moving.

Twelve hours. Spend them together.

She had spent ninety days learning the rules of this apartment. Never the east hallway after ten. Never his study, unless the door was open. Never his door at all. She stood in front of it now in her scrub pants and one of Walter's old cardigans, and she knocked. Twice, not softly.

Sebastian opened it before the second knock finished. He hadn't been sleeping either. His tie was gone, his sleeves were rolled, and the lamp behind him showed a desk covered in paper he wasn't reading.

"You got one too," he said, looking at her phone.

"Older man. Careful grammar. Calls the paper by its first name."

"Page one," Sebastian said. "Of course it is." He stepped back, which was as close as he came to an invitation. "Come in. Please."

It was the first time she had been inside. It was smaller than she'd imagined and much plainer. A narrow bed. A shelf of hospital-donation paperbacks, spines cracked. A framed photograph turned face down on the dresser, and she knew without asking whose it was.

"I'm not going to apologize first," she said. "I'm telling you now so you don't wait for it."

"I wasn't going to ask you to." He sat on the edge of the desk. "I was going to say that I was wrong about the money, and that I'm not sure I know how to be right about it. I have never once been in a room where I couldn't fix a problem by paying for it. You walked out of that kitchen and I stood there holding my checkbook like an idiot."

"You don't carry a checkbook."

"I was holding it in spirit."

She laughed. It came out cracked and surprised, and it loosened something in her chest that had been clenched since the Okafor call. Sebastian watched her do it as if it were a thing he had paid good money for and didn't expect to receive.

"Okay," Imogen said. "Here's what I think. The Ledger has the contract. They have Bianca. They have the word rented and a picture of me in a wedding dress that I'm sure looks very expensive. Whatever they print, it's their story. We can read it at breakfast like everybody else, or we can put another one in front of it."

"Okafor says no statements. Okafor says silence, an injunction, and a very large invoice."

"Okafor works for you."

"Okafor works for the company."

"Then I'll work for me." She sat down on the floor with her back against his bed, because the only chair was the one under his papers, and pulled her knees up. "I don't want a corporate statement. Nobody has ever been moved by a corporate statement. I want to tell it myself. What happened, in order. The debt, the house on Comfrey Lane, your grandfather, the offer, all of it. The ugly parts too."

"Especially the ugly parts."

"Especially those." She looked up at him. "You'd have to be okay with that. It makes you look like exactly what Bianca says you are."

He was quiet for long enough that she heard the building settle around them, forty floors of steel adjusting to the cold.

"Write it," he said. "I'll sit here."

"You'll read it?"

"If you want me to."

"I want you to," Imogen said, and was surprised to find it was true.

It took them most of the night. She wrote on his laptop, hunched cross-legged on the floor, and he worked through the paper on his desk without turning a page, listening to her type. Around one he made tea, badly. Around two she called the only reporter she trusted, a woman named Dana Reyes who had written the story about the ICU closure last spring, the one that actually mentioned the nurses by name. Dana answered on the second ring, sounding like she'd been awake for a decade.

"Tell me it's not a favor," Dana said.

"It's an exclusive," Imogen said. "Before six. And you can't change my words, only ask me questions."

A long breath on the line. "Send it."

She sent it at ten past three. Then she sat very still, the way she did at the end of a code, when the numbers had stopped and everyone was waiting to find out what kind of morning it was going to be.

Sebastian read it standing at the window, with the city lit up like a circuit board below him. She watched his shoulders. They didn't move until the last paragraph, and then they did.

"One change," he said.

Her stomach dropped. "Which part?"

"Here." He turned the laptop toward her and pointed. She had written: Sebastian Crowther offered me a contract. He did not force me to sign it. "That's generous. It's also not the whole truth. Put in that I bought a wife. That's what it was, in the beginning, and I knew it. Leave it in."

"It makes you sound terrible."

"It makes me sound accurate." He said it quietly. "I would rather be hated for what I did than loved for something I'm not. I've had the second one before. It doesn't hold weight."

Imogen read the line again. Then she typed it in, word for word, and under it she added a sentence of her own, because he didn't get to have the last word on his own life: He also stayed up all night to read mine.

At four she went to find her phone and found a missed call from Danny instead. Three of them. A text under them: where are you, call me, they're outside the gym asking about you.

Her blood went cold.

"Danny," she said, already dialing. It rang and rang. When he answered at last he was out of breath, outdoors, with traffic behind him. "Imogen, there's a guy here with a camera. He says he's from the Ledger. He knew Mom's name. He knew about the house."

"Go inside. Lock the door. Don't say anything to anybody, you hear me? Not one word."

"Are you okay? Is it true, what he said, that you married a guy for money?"

She closed her eyes. Across the room Sebastian had gone still.

"It's true that it started that way," she said. "That's not all that's true. I'll tell you all of it in an hour. Danny, I promise. Just go inside."

She hung up. For a second neither of them spoke.

"They moved early," Sebastian said. "They didn't wait for the twelve hours."

"They don't have to wait. They've already got the cameras." Her hands were shaking now, finally, and she pressed them flat against her knees. "Send it, Sebastian. Tell Dana to run it now."

"Dana has it."

"Then it's not enough. They've got the head start."

He crossed the room and knelt in front of her, close enough that she could see the exhaustion drawn in the lines around his eyes. He didn't touch her. He waited, with that terrible patience he'd learned somewhere, until she looked at him.

"Whatever's on page one in the morning," he said, "you're not alone when you read it. That wasn't in the contract either."

Her phone buzzed against the floor between them. Dana: Running it at 5:00. Brace yourself. Somebody beat us to a headline.

Imogen turned the screen so he could see. Below Dana's text, a new alert from the Ledger's website had just lit up, red and brief:

BREAKING: Crowther Heir's "Rented Wife" Has a Second Secret.

Neither of them had written it. Neither of them knew what it meant.