Thirty days to forever

Sera’s pov

The lawyer's office smells like lemon polish and old paper. I keep thinking that's a strange thing to notice at a moment like this, except grief does that to you. It shrinks the whole world down to small, stupid details. The scratch of the pen in Mr. Okafor's hand. The clock that's four minutes fast. A plate of shortbread cookies, untouched, like anyone in this room is hungry.

I am not hungry. I'm sitting very still in a chair that's too big for me, in a black dress I bought two days ago because I didn't own anything appropriate for burying my grandfather, and I'm trying very hard not to look at my cousin.

I fail. I look at Vera anyway.

She's sitting across the table with her legs crossed at the ankle and her spine perfectly straight, the way our grandmother used to make us sit as kids — back straight, chin up, you're a Calloway. I hated that instruction. Vera loved it. She's got her phone face-down on the table like she's trying to seem respectful, but I know her. I've known her since we were seven, since she stole my seat at Christmas dinner because she got there first and rules are rules. She isn't respectful. She's patient. There's a difference, and the difference is the small, satisfied curve at the corner of her mouth that she thinks I can't see.

She thinks she already won.

“Shall we begin?” Mr. Okafor says. He was my grandfather's lawyer for thirty years — long enough to watch him build Calloway Shipping out of two rusted barges and a loan he shouldn't have qualified for. His voice is doing this careful, gentle thing right now, like he's handling something breakable. I appreciate that more than I can say. I also hate it, because it means he knows what's coming and I don't.

“Yes,” I say, steadier than I expect. Small victories.

He opens the folder. I watch his hands instead of his face, because his face keeps doing something complicated every time he glances at me, and I don't have room for one more complicated thing today.

“The will of Edmund Calloway,” he reads, “executed the fourteenth of March, revised most recently four months ago.”

Four months ago. I do the math without meaning to. Four months ago he was already sick and none of us knew — or he knew and didn't say, which, knowing him, is the more likely version. My grandfather kept secrets the way other men kept pocket change, absentmindedly, in every pocket, until you found one you weren't expecting and it changed the whole shape of your day.

The bequests start ordinary. The house in Cape May to my aunt Rosalind. His sailboat — the little one he taught me to crew when I was nine — to me, and I press my knuckles against my mouth to keep from making a sound. Money to the dockworkers' pension fund, which makes even Mr. Okafor's voice catch before he continues.

Then he gets to the company.

“The entirety of Calloway Shipping and Holdings, including all vessels, contracts, properties, and outstanding interests,” he reads, “is to pass to my granddaughter, Sera Calloway.”

For one second I let myself feel it — relief, pure and stupid and premature. Vera's mouth flattens. Good. I let myself have that too.

Then Mr. Okafor keeps reading, and something in his voice tells me the sentence isn't finished.

“—subject,” he says, “to the following condition.”

Vera's mouth curves back up. Of course it does. She's not patient because she's a good person. She's patient because she already read this. I'd bet the whole company on it.

“Go on,” I managed.

He doesn't look at me when he reads it. I think he's being kind. “In order for Sera Calloway to assume full and uncontested control of Calloway Shipping and Holdings, she must be legally married within thirty days of this reading. She must remain married, without interruption, for a period of no less than one year. Should she fail to marry within that period, or should the marriage dissolve before the year is complete, full ownership will transfer in entirety to Vera Calloway.”

The room goes very quiet.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “Can you — read that again?”

He does. It doesn't sound any different the second time. It just sounds like my grandfather, a man who spent his whole life building something out of nothing, reaching out from wherever he is now and handing me a bomb with a thirty-day fuse.

“That's absurd,” I hear myself say. “People can't write marriage requirements into a will — isn't that coercive, or void, or —”

“It's unusual,” Mr. Okafor says carefully, “but not unprecedented, and I've had the clause reviewed independently. It will hold. Your grandfather was very specific about the language. He wanted to be certain it would.”

“Why would he do this to me?”

Vera answers before the lawyer can. “Because he knew you,” she says, sweet as a knife going in clean. “He knew you'd run the company into the ground playing it safe, the way you play everything. He wanted you to have skin in the game.” She pauses, lets it land. “Or maybe he just wanted to give you a graceful way to hand it to someone who actually wants it.”

“That's not what this is,” I say. But I don't actually know that. That's the terrible part.

“Thirty days,” Vera says, standing, smoothing her skirt. “I'll start clearing my calendar for the transition. No hard feelings, Sera.”

There are hard feelings. There have always been hard feelings. I don't say so. I just watch her go, heels clicking against the hardwood, and think, distantly, that I have never wanted to win something as badly as I want to win this.

• • •

Mr. Okafor waits until the door clicks shut before his shoulders drop, just slightly. “I didn't know about the condition until the final revision. I tried to talk him out of it, Sera. For what it's worth.”

“What did he say?”

“That you were stronger than you thought, and that sometimes people need a deadline to find that out.” He closes the folder, squares its edges. “I have some concerns about his methods.”

I laugh, cracked and a little unhinged. “Thirty days to find a husband. That's insane, right? Tell me that's insane.”

“It's certainly unconventional,” he allows, gently enough that I almost believe it's a kindness and not just a fact. “There is no approved list, no shortcut. It has to be real — filed, witnessed, provable if it's ever challenged, and given what's at stake, it will be challenged.”

“Great,” I say. “On top of finding a husband in a month, I have to convince a courtroom it's real.”

“I'm sorry,” he says, and he sounds like he means it, which is the only reason I don't cry right there in the chair that's too big for me.

• • •

I don't remember leaving the building. I remember standing on the sidewalk in the flat gray afternoon light, watching a bus roll by with a mattress ad wrapped around its side, thinking that the city doesn't know or care that the ground just moved under me.

My phone buzzes. Then again. By the time I reach my car there are six messages from five numbers I don't recognize, and a very specific, sick feeling telling me exactly how fast the news traveled. The will was sealed until this afternoon. It's been public for less than two hours.

I sit without starting the engine and open the first message, because some part of me already knows this is the first domino.

It's from a name everyone in this industry recognizes. Damian Voss. My grandfather's least favorite competitor — “that cold little shark in a good suit,” he used to call him, at every board dinner for a decade.

I heard about the condition in the will. We should talk. I have a proposal that solves both our problems. — D.V.