The Proposal

Hannah's coffee mug stopped halfway to her mouth. "That's a strange thing to promise someone."

"It's not a promise. It's an observation." Andy pushed off the counter and crossed to the window, hands in his pockets, the city gray and glittering behind him. "You want them to lose everything. I can make that happen. The only question is whether you want to be part of it."

"Be part of what, exactly?"

"Revenge." He said the word the way he said everything—flat, considered, like he'd already tested it for weaknesses. "Not a scene in a hotel lobby. Not a lawyer's letter. I mean the kind of consequence that takes months to build and can't be undone."

Hannah set the mug down. Her hands had finally stopped shaking somewhere around 3 a.m., and she wasn't ready to give that up. "You've thought about this."

"I've thought about very little else since March."

The admission landed harder than she expected. Five months of watching his own wife across a dinner table, saying nothing, building a case instead. She didn't know if that made him patient or terrifying. Possibly both.

"Walk me through it," she said.

Andy came back to the counter, close enough that she caught last night still clinging to the collar of his shirt. "We don't expose them. Not yet. We let Danny and Gianna believe they've gotten away with it—that we're both too broken, too humiliated, too slow to notice. That gives them room to get reckless. People who think they've already won stop being careful."

"And while they're busy not being careful?"

"You rebuild everything they think they took from you. I take apart everything Danny thinks he's entitled to. Quietly. Piece by piece. By the time we're finished, there won't be anything left for either of them to walk away with."

Hannah studied him. Really studied him—the exhaustion under his eyes, the shirt he hadn't changed, the calculation that hadn't once slowed down. "That could take months."

"It will take months." His eyes didn't leave hers. "Are you asking if you can handle that, or asking if I can?"

"Both."

Something almost like amusement crossed his face. Gone in a blink. "Then we'll find out together."

He set the first two rules down plainly—simple ones, the kind that sounded reasonable until she actually thought about what they were protecting against. No innocent people. Not Danny's employees, not Gianna's family, no one who hadn't chosen to be part of this. And no lying to each other, not even the small kind, not even to make a bad night easier.

"That's an easy one," Hannah said.

"It won't be. Not for either of us." He held her gaze a beat too long before continuing. "The evidence stays between us until we're ready to use it. Not before. I don't care how satisfying it would feel to end this tonight."

"And if I want to end it tonight?"

"Then you tell me that. You don't act on it alone." His voice had dropped, low enough that she felt it more than heard it. "That's the fourth rule. Whatever happens between us, we don't use it as a weapon. Not even when we're angry at each other. Especially not then."

The words between us sat in the room longer than they should have.

Hannah wrapped both hands around her mug, mostly for something to hold on to. "You make it sound like there's already something between us to protect."

Andy didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice had lost its careful edge. "Last night, you fell asleep on my couch telling me about a fish tank. I don't think either of us gets to pretend that didn't happen. Not to each other, and not to ourselves."

"That's rule five."

"That's rule five."

She should have looked away. She didn't. There was something unbearably intimate about being read that clearly by someone who used to know her handwriting, her fears, the exact pitch of her laugh before she learned to perform a smaller, safer version of it for Danny.

"And the sixth?" she asked, because she needed him to keep talking, needed the sound of his voice to fill the space before she did something reckless with the silence.

Andy set his coffee down. He stepped closer—not far, just enough that she had to tilt her chin to keep looking at him, close enough that she could see he hadn't shaved, close enough that the air between them stopped feeling like air and started feeling like something that needed to be crossed.

"Revenge comes first," he said quietly. "That's the only thing either of us is allowed to promise right now. I'm not going to tell you what happens after, because I don't know. I'm not going to pretend I don't want to know."

Hannah's breath caught somewhere in her chest and stayed there.

"That's not really a rule," she said. "That's a warning."

"It's both."

For one long moment, neither of them moved. The coffee machine had gone silent behind them. Somewhere below, the city kept doing what cities did, indifferent to the two people standing three feet apart in a kitchen, close enough to touch, close enough that not touching had become its own kind of decision.

Hannah stepped back first. It cost her more than she wanted to admit.

"Okay," she said. "Show me how we start."

Something shifted in Andy's expression—not quite a smile, but close enough to be its ancestor. He reached past her for a folder she hadn't noticed sitting on the counter, thick with paper, the corner of a bank statement visible at the edge.

"I already started," he said. "Three weeks ago. I just needed to know you'd say yes before I showed you how far I'd gotten."

He opened the folder and slid it toward her.

Hannah looked down at the first page—Danny's name, a list of investors, a column of numbers with several already circled in red—and felt something cold and clean settle where the grief had been sitting for the last twelve hours.

"You've already started taking his company apart."

"I've already started making it possible for you to watch him lose it." Andy's voice was quiet, almost gentle, which somehow made it worse. "I told you. I've thought about very little else since March."