Chapter 4

Mara's POV

I called Priya from the parking lot. She picked up on the first ring the way she always did when she knew something was wrong, which was almost always because Priya had an instinct for trouble that bordered on supernatural. I had barely finished two sentences before she interrupted me.

"He did what?"

"Keep your voice down," I said, even though she was in another city and there was no one near me.

"Mara, he filed for custody and then offered marriage in the same meeting. That is not a legal strategy, that is a hostage situation."

"I know what it is," I said.

"What are you going to do?"

I leaned against my car and looked up at the glass building I had just walked out of. Fourteen floors of clean lines and expensive decisions. "I have seventy two hours to decide."

Priya was quiet for a moment, which was unusual enough that I paid attention to it. "What does your gut say?"

"My gut says I should have stayed in the last city."

"That's not what I asked."

I closed my eyes. "My gut says if I fight him in court I lose Lily. Not permanently maybe, but enough. Shared custody at minimum, which means she's with him half the time without me there to manage how that goes. She doesn't know him. She has never heard his name. The idea of her being handed to a stranger every other week because a judge said so……" I stopped. "I can't."

"So you're considering it," Priya said.

"I'm considering not losing my daughter," I said. "Those are different things."

She exhaled slowly. "Okay. Okay, listen to me. If you do this, you go in with conditions. You protect yourself legally. You don't just sign whatever he puts in front of you and hope for the best."

"He has Dominic," I said. "His brother is his attorney."

"Then you need your own," she said. "I'm sending you a name. She's good and she's fast and she doesn't let people get walked over. Call her today."

I wrote the name down when it came through. Then I sat in the car for a while longer before I drove back to pick up Lily.

***********************

Lily was at the kitchen table with Carol when I got there, deeply focused on a drawing she was making with Carol's collection of colored pencils. She held it up when she saw me. It was a house with four windows and two people standing outside and a small figure between them that I understood was meant to be her.

"That's our new house," she told me seriously. "And that's you and that's the man from the party."

My stomach turned over.

"What man, baby?" I asked carefully.

"The one with the same eyes as me," she said, and went back to coloring.

Carol looked at me over Lily's head with an expression that asked a question I wasn't ready to answer. I smiled in a way that I hoped looked normal and took Lily home.

That night after Lily was asleep I sat at my kitchen table with a piece of paper and wrote two columns. Stay and fight. Agree and marry. I stared at both columns for a long time and then I folded the paper and put it in the bin because I already knew which one I was choosing and writing it down didn't make it easier.

I called the attorney Priya sent me. Her name was Sandra Okafor and she had a sharp, efficient phone manner that made me feel slightly better about everything within thirty seconds. I explained the situation as clearly as I could. She asked precise questions. She didn't react to any of it with anything other than focus, which I appreciated.

She told me that if I was going to agree to the marriage I needed a prenuptial agreement that protected my rights as Lily's primary caregiver, a clause that gave me legal grounds to exit the marriage after a defined period without automatic custody implications, and documentation that the marriage was entered under duress so that if things deteriorated I had grounds to challenge any agreements made during it.

I asked her if Colton would agree to those terms.

She said that depended on how much he wanted the marriage versus how much he wanted the fight, and that the answer to that question would tell me everything I needed to know about what his real intentions were.

I slept three hours that night.

**********************

I called Colton the following morning and told him I had conditions.

He was quiet for a moment. "Send them through."

"I want my own attorney present for any agreement we sign," I said.

"Fine."

"I want a clause protecting my role as Lily's primary caregiver regardless of our marital status."

"We can discuss the language," he said.

"I also want it on record that this arrangement was not entered freely," I said. "That I agreed under legal pressure."

That one was met with a longer silence. When he spoke again his voice had an edge to it that hadn't been there before. "You want documentation that I coerced you."

"I want documentation of the truth," I said.

"And if I refuse that condition?"

"Then I take my chances in court and we both spend the next year making lawyers rich," I said. "I don't want that. I don't think you actually want that either. You want Lily. I'm offering you Lily in the most stable arrangement possible. All I'm asking for is honesty about how we got here."

Another silence. Longer this time.

"Send your attorney to Dominic's office at two o'clock," he said finally. "We'll work through the terms."

"Colton," I said before he could hang up.

"What."

"Whatever this is," I said, "whatever you think you're building by forcing my hand, I need you to know that Lily is not a strategy. She is a child. And she will figure out very quickly if the people around her are performing rather than present."

He didn't answer for a long moment.

"Two o'clock," he said. Then quieter, almost to himself, "I know she's not a strategy, Mara."

The line went quiet. I wasn't sure which of us hung up first.