The Offer

The car was warm and smelled like leather that cost more than her car. Imogen sat as far from the man in the coat as physics allowed and watched the city smear past the window, and did not let herself wonder why she had gotten in.

They went up forty floors of a building with CROWTHER in brushed steel over the doors. The elevator opened into an office the size of her house. Behind a black desk, in front of a wall of rain-streaked glass, stood a man who looked like grief had hired a tailor.

Sebastian Crowther. She knew the face. Everyone knew the face. It had been on magazine covers next to words like "ruthless" and "most eligible", and once, two months ago, next to a society headline about a wedding that had not happened.

"Miss Hartley." He did not offer his hand. "Sit."

"I'll stand."

Something crossed his face. Not annoyance. Inventory. "My grandfather spoke about you for three weeks. The nurse who wouldn't let him cheat at chess." He said it flatly, like reading a report. "He died owing you eleven games."

"Twelve," she said. "He'd want the record correct."

For a fraction of a second the CEO slipped and a grandson looked out. Then it was gone. He picked up a folder.

"I'll be direct. Walter's will gives me his fifty-one percent of this company on two conditions. I marry within thirty days of the will reading. I stay married for one hundred days." He turned a page he didn't need to turn. "Fail either, and the shares go into a board trust. My cousin Vivienne controls the board. Do you follow?"

"I follow gossip columns. This isn't in them."

"It will be, the day I'm desperate enough to do what Vivienne expects: crawl back to my ex-fiancee and pay her family to stand at an altar." His jaw did a small, tight thing. "I am not going to do that."

"Then marry someone else."

"I intend to." He closed the folder. "You."

The rain ticked against the glass. Imogen waited for the rest of the joke, and it didn't come, and the silence got expensive.

"You're out of your mind."

"I'm out of options. You're out of time." He slid a single sheet across the desk. "Five hundred thousand dollars. Half at signing, half on day one hundred. Separate rooms. No physical contact beyond what photographers require. You attend events, you smile, you do not speak to press, and on day one hundred a quiet divorce and a non-disclosure agreement with teeth." He paused. "My lawyers ran you. The house on Comfrey Lane. Your brother's situation. You have twenty-nine days, Miss Hartley, and they will not be kind ones."

Anger got there before fear did. "You had me investigated."

"I had you verified. There's a difference, and the difference is what you sign." He said it without cruelty, which was its own kind of cruelty. "My grandfather trusted you. I don't believe in trust, but I believe in his judgment, and I believe in motivated sellers. You don't want me. You want your mother's house. That's the cleanest transaction I'll ever make."

She looked at the sheet. The number had so many zeros it seemed rude.

Then she looked at him, at the cufflinks, at the office built out of other people's yeses, and said, "No."

She took the service elevator down because no one stopped her, and walked home in the rain because the bus never came, and told herself the shaking in her hands was the cold.

Her front door was open.

Not broken. Open. She had locked it that morning; she always locked it. The hall table was on its side. Her keys lay where they always lay, and the cream envelope was gone, and in the living room, on the floor between the overturned chairs, Danny sat with a kitchen towel pressed to his mouth, and the towel was red.

"They said to tell you the calendar moved up," her brother said through a split lip. He was twenty-four and still smiled like a kid when he was scared. "Ten days, Immy. They said ten, and next time it's not the furniture."

Upstairs, her mother's room was untouched. They had known exactly what to break and exactly what to leave, which meant they had known exactly what mattered.

Imogen stood in the wreckage of the only thing her family had ever owned, with Danny bleeding onto her mother's rug, and she took the thick cream card out of her coat. The ink was embossed. The number answered on the first ring, though it was almost midnight.

"Tell Mr. Crowther I want to renegotiate," she said. "Then tell him I'll do it."