Three

Kai’s pov

I'm still at the warehouse when Sera texts me. Come over? Nothing else. She doesn't need to explain — I've been saying yes to her since we were fourteen, since she showed up at my mom's door soaked because she didn't want to go home to an empty house.

I lock up and drive over with the radio off. Bad idea. Gives me too much room to think.

Her grandfather's dead. Edmund Calloway gave me my first job at sixteen — sweeping the dry dock for cash because my mom needed it and was too proud to ask anyone for help. Taught me how to read a bill of lading before I could drive. Called me son sometimes, in that gruff way older guys do when the word costs them something. I haven't really let myself grieve for him yet. Tonight isn't about that. Tonight's about her.

• • •

She opens the door before I even knock, which means she was watching for headlights, which means today was bad.

“They're already circling,” she says, pulling me in by the sleeve. “Damian Voss texted me two hours after the will went public. Two hours, Kai. He had a merger memo ready. Like I'm a company he's acquiring.”

“You are a company he's acquiring,” I say, before I can stop myself.

She laughs — short, surprised. First good sign since I walked in. “Not helping.”

“Wasn't trying to help. Just true.”

She drops onto the couch, tucks her legs up the way she has since high school, and I sit at the other end, same distance we've always kept. She walks me through it — thirty days, married a full year with no gaps, Vera already clearing her calendar like it's decided.

Something goes tight in my chest when she gets to the part where Voss told her he wasn't going to bother pretending to care about her. I have to look at my hands for a second.

“He actually said that to you.”

“Said it like I should be grateful. Like not lying to me is some kind of gift.”

“That's not honesty,” I say. “That's just a colder lie. Telling you he won't pretend doesn't mean he's not still working an angle. It means he figured out you'd respect him more for saying it out loud.”

She looks at me a second too long. I've said more than I meant to.

“You sound annoyed.”

“I am annoyed. Guy shows up on the worst day of your life with a spreadsheet where his condolences should be, and you're supposed to actually consider it?”

“It is reasonable, though. That's the problem. Everything about it makes sense except the part where I'd be married to someone who thinks feelings are a weakness in a negotiation.” She rubs her face. “Twenty-nine days, Kai. I don't even have a shortlist. Just a merger memo and a bunch of texts from numbers I don't know.”

I should say something careful here. Ten years of practice, I know exactly how to do the careful thing — keep my voice light, hands still, face doing the friendly, steady version of itself it's always done around her.

What comes out instead is, “Marry me.”

The room goes quiet. A car alarm goes off outside and stops. Sera's looking at me like I switched languages mid-sentence.

“What?”

I could take it back. There's an easy version of the next few seconds where I laugh, say I'm kidding, and we go back to being exactly what we've always been.

I don't take it back.

“I'm not saying it like Voss did,” I say, voice rougher than I want. “Not because of the company or the contracts. I've known you since we were fourteen. I watched you grow up into someone who runs herself ragged taking care of everyone your family's ever been responsible for, and for ten years I told myself wanting more than your friendship was selfish. You needed steady. I figured steady doesn't get to want things.”

“Kai—”

“I'm not done.” She closes her mouth, lets me keep going. “If you need a husband in twenty-nine days, you've already got one who's never once thought of you as an asset. I know it's not what you pictured. I know it's a weird thing to bring up on the worst week of your life. But I'd rather say it badly and mean it than watch you marry a shark just because he had the guts to be upfront about being one.”

The quiet that follows is the longest ten seconds I can remember sitting through, and I've waited out hurricane winds on a dock for word a ship made it in.

“You never said anything,” she says finally. “Ten years, and you never —”

“I know.”

“Why now?”

“Because you're about to make the biggest call of your life surrounded by guys who all want something from you,” I say. “I'd rather you know what I want up front — which is just you — before you have to guess your way through the rest of them.”

She doesn't answer right away. Just looks at me the way she used to look at a hard problem set in high school, like she's hunting for the clean solution buried under the messy one.

“I need to think,” she says, and her voice isn't steady, which I've genuinely never heard from her before.

“That's fair,” I say, meaning it, even though part of me wants to grab the words back and swallow them, just to keep the easy ten years we had before tonight.

I don't leave. She doesn't ask me to. We sit on opposite ends of the same couch, and somewhere in the twenty-nine days ahead, I'm going to find out whether I just told her the truth or wrecked the one good thing I had left of her grandfather's world.