Five

Sera’s pov

Marcus calls before I've even made coffee, which means he either didn't sleep or he's been sitting on the call since dawn waiting for a decent hour to make it look casual. Knowing Marcus, it's the second one.

“I won't keep you,” he says, which is what he always says right before he keeps me for twenty minutes. “I just wanted to check on you. This week has been a lot, and I know your grandfather would want someone looking out for you.”

“That's kind,” I say, and I mean it, mostly, even though something about the phrasing snags. Someone looking out for me. Not I want to look out for you. Like he's citing an obligation instead of stating a want.

Marcus has been in my life since I was twelve — my grandfather's business partner, then his closest friend, then something that never quite had a name but sat at every holiday table like family anyway. He's elegant in a way that photographs well and unsettles you slightly in person, all careful tailoring and the kind of warmth that seems to have been rehearsed until it looked natural. I've never been able to decide if that's unfair of me to think or exactly right.

“I heard about the clause,” he says. “Thirty days. It's an extraordinary thing for Edmund to have done.”

“That's one word for it.”

“I want you to know,” he says, and there's a pause here, small, deliberate, the kind of pause a man takes when he's rehearsed a line enough times that he still wants it to sound spontaneous, “that I've always assumed, if the day ever came that your grandfather couldn't be the one steadying things, it would fall to me. I don't say that to pressure you. I say it because I don't think you should have to sort through strangers when you already have someone who's spent half his life in this family.”

I sit with that for a second, coffee forgotten, and I realize slowly, uncomfortably, that Marcus Ellery just proposed to me without using the word once. It's smoother than Damian's spreadsheet. It doesn't feel less like a transaction. It just feels like one wearing better clothes.

“Marcus,” I say carefully, “are you asking me to marry you?”

“I'm telling you the option exists,” he says, “with no expiration and no pressure. Whatever you decide, I'll support it. I only wanted you to know you're not as alone in this as it might feel.”

It's a good line. It's such a good line that I almost believe it doesn't have an agenda folded inside it, and then I remember Marcus doesn't say anything that doesn't have an agenda folded inside it, gently, the way you'd fold a knife into a napkin so it doesn't catch the light.

I tell him I need to think. He tells me to take all the time I need, which from him means call me back before anyone else does, and we hang up, and I sit at my kitchen counter with my coffee going cold and four days gone out of thirty and absolutely no closer to an answer than I was a week ago.

• • •

Four men in six days. Damian with his memo. Kai with ten years of silence breaking open in one sentence I still haven't fully recovered from. Theo, who quoted my grandfather back to me like a ghost and then told me to go looking for something in the will that Mr. Okafor never mentioned. And now Marcus, offering himself up like a foregone conclusion, like the only reasonable ending to a story he's been quietly writing since I was twelve years old.

Any other week, I'd laugh at the idea that I have this problem. Four men, all wanting something that looks like me and mostly isn't. It doesn't feel like a good problem. It feels like standing in the middle of four different roads, and every single one of them leads somewhere I'm not sure I chose.

I think about what Theo said in the parking lot. Precise men don't leave a thirty-day deadline without knowing exactly how someone smart enough could get around the parts that don't work.

I've been turning that over since he drove off. My grandfather was many things, but careless with language was never one of them. He wrote contracts himself, personally, long after he could afford lawyers to do it for him, because he didn't trust anyone else to get every clause exactly as tight as he wanted it. A man like that doesn't write thirty days and one husband by accident. If there's a way around the trap he built, he built it in on purpose.

I call Mr. Okafor. It takes him four hours to call back, which for a lawyer during a contested estate is practically instant, and when he does, his voice has the particular flatness of a man who has spent the afternoon reading something he didn't expect to find.

“I want you to know I only found this because you asked,” he says. “I wouldn't have thought to look. It's obscure enough that most estate attorneys go their whole careers without encountering it.”

“Found what?”

“There's a statute still on the books,” he says, “dating back to an old maritime-trade provision from the eighteen-nineties. Multi-party marriage, legally recognized, provided all parties consent and the union is properly filed. It was never repealed — just quietly stopped being used once social convention moved past it. Your grandfather's clause says married. It doesn't say to one person.”

• • •

Mr. Okafor's office opens at eight. I'm in the waiting room at seven forty, legal pad on my knee, four names written across the top in handwriting that gets progressively less steady the longer I look at it. His assistant offers me coffee I don't drink. I've had enough cold coffee for one lifetime by this point in the week.

He waves me in before eight even hits the clock, which tells me he saw my name on his calendar and cleared whatever came before it. I appreciate that more than I say.

“I want to draw up the marriage under the statute,” I say, before he's even sat down, because if I let myself hesitate I'm going to lose my nerve entirely. “The multi-party provision. I want it done properly, not as a loophole I'm hoping nobody notices — filed correctly, witnessed correctly, built to survive a court challenge if Vera comes at it with everything she has.”

He sits slowly, folder already open, pen already uncapped, like he'd guessed this was coming the second I asked him to research the statute in the first place. “How many parties are we discussing?”

“Four.”