chapter 6

The Bargain

The ceremony passed in fragments. A hymn Wren didn’t know. A ring slid onto her finger with a precision that felt like a signature. The officiant’s voice saying husband and wife in a church full of people who had come to witness a merger. When Adrian bent to kiss her, it was brief and cool, a sealed document of a kiss, and Wren stood very still and thought, absurdly, of the diner’s coffee machine and the way it hissed when it was done.

The reception was worse. She smiled until her jaw ached. She answered to “Seraphina” eleven times, and each time the name felt like a stranger’s coat. Adrian stayed beside her through all of it, one hand light at the small of her back, saying almost nothing. Whenever a guest asked too many questions, he answered them first, smoothly, in a voice that closed the subject like a door.

Neither of them spoke in the car afterward. The city slid past in streaks of gold and glass, and Wren watched her reflection in the window, a bride in a borrowed face. Adrian sat with his hands folded, looking at nothing. She counted the seconds between streetlights to keep from counting everything else.

The Lockhart house stood behind a wall of pale stone, at the end of a gravel drive lined with linden trees. It was quieter than the Ashworth house and somehow more intimidating, because nothing in it was trying to impress. A woman in a dark dress waited at the door with her hands clasped.

“Mrs. Okafor,” Adrian said. “My wife is tired. Please have tea sent to my study.”

He said my wife as though he were reading it off a label.

The study smelled of cedar and old paper. A fire had been lit, and for the first time in weeks Wren thought she might be warm. Adrian shut the door, crossed to the window, and stood with his back to her for a long moment. Then he turned.

“You may sit,” he said. “Or not. I would understand if you preferred to stand for this.”

She stood.

“Good.” Something almost like approval crossed his face and vanished. “Let us be direct, Miss Calloway. I have known who you are for nineteen days.”

Wren’s hands went cold. “How?”

“The Ashworths are careless with paperwork, and I am not careless with anything.” He said it without arrogance, as a fact about weather. “When the arrangement was confirmed, I had Seraphina’s file pulled. The woman I was promised has a birthmark she covers with powder. The woman in the surveillance photographs did not. So I looked closer, and I found you.”

Surveillance. The black sedan outside the diner. “You had me watched.”

“The Ashworths had you watched. I read their report.” He met her eyes. “I did not stop the wedding.”

“Why not?”

“That is one of the things I will not tell you tonight.”

Wren laughed, short and disbelieving. “You’re asking me to trust you with nothing.”

“I am asking you to make a bargain with me. Trust is a different arrangement, and a more expensive one.” He crossed to the desk and slid a single sheet toward her. “Read it.”

The page held five terms, typed in plain lines. He would keep her secret. They would show both families a marriage. They would live in separate rooms. Neither would ask the other’s reasons without permission. The arrangement would end when its purpose was met, whatever that turned out to be. Wren read it twice, the way Ms. Pruitt had taught her.

“Whose purpose?” she asked.

“Mine, at the moment.”

“That is not good enough.” Her voice shook, and she hated it. “You want me to stand next to you and lie to your family, and I get to find out why later. Here is what I want. Edna’s care. Everything the Ashworths promised, and your word that if they break it, you will not let it fall.”

“Done.”

It came too quickly. Wren narrowed her eyes. “And Sundays. I visit my grandmother every Sunday. Alone. No driver reporting back to anyone.”

“You may take my driver, and he will report to no one but me. Edna Calloway will have the best cardiologist in the country. If the hospital is wrong for her, we will move her.” A pause. “Is there anything else?”

Wren looked at the page. Her whole life she had signed things when she had no choice, and for the first time she was being asked. It made her suspicious. It also made her stubborn.

“I want a sixth line. You don’t lie to me. If you can’t tell me something, you say you can’t. You don’t make up something else.”

Adrian was silent for so long that she thought she had gone too far. Then he picked up his pen, wrote a single line at the bottom of the page, and turned it so she could read it. No lies between us.

“Agreed,” he said, and the corner of his mouth moved a fraction, the first break in that exact line. “You are not what I expected.”

“You knew exactly who I was.”

“I knew what you were. That is not the same thing.”

They signed. His signature was neat and angular, and hers shook. Mrs. Okafor knocked with the tea, and the contract disappeared into a drawer.

At the door, Wren stopped. “Should I call you Mr. Lockhart?”

“In public, call me Adrian. In private—” He considered. “Whatever you prefer.”

“And what do I call myself?”

“In public, Seraphina. Where no one is listening—” His eyes held hers, dark and level and unreadable. “Wren.”

It was the first time in weeks that anyone had said her name as though it belonged to a person. She climbed the stairs behind Mrs. Okafor with her chin raised, the way Sera had taught her, and did not let herself cry until the door was closed.