All Chapters of Three-Years Contract Marriage with the Billionaire : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

LENAI had been to events my entire professional life.This is what I told myself on the car ride over, in the specific internal voice I used for the management of situations that required me to be composed before I had fully finished becoming composed. I had organized galas and benefit dinners and silent auctions and seated receptions for three hundred people in rooms that had required months of planning and attention and the particular discipline of someone who understood that the difference between an event that worked and an event that merely happened was invisible to everyone except the person who had made it invisible. I had been to more formal evenings than I could accurately count and I had never once felt out of my depth in one because the depth was always something I had measured in advance.I had not measured this one.The car moved through the city and I looked out the window and I thought about the program I had looked up online two days ago when Julian had said, with the

LENA"She makes a choice," he said. His voice had returned to the register it knew. Almost entirely. "Between the life she built and the thing she actually wants. They've been the same thing for a long time. In the third act she finds out they're not."I thought about this."What does she choose," I said.He looked at me then. Not at the stage doors or the middle distance or the champagne. At me. With the expression I was always in the middle of reading. The real one. The one without management."Come and see," he said.The doors opened.We went back in.I will not describe the third act in detail.Not because it was not worth describing but because some things resist the particular mechanics of description and the third act was one of them. What I will say is that the soprano did what Julian had said she would do, she made a choice, and the choice was the one I had understood, from the moment he described the structure in the back of the set, that she was going to make, and knowing i

JULIANI have been studying since eleven.Not working, which was unusual. Reading, which was also unusual at that hour, though not in the way that required explanation or concern, I had slept earlier, briefly, the specific shallow sleep of a man whose mind was doing its work even in the resting, and had come awake at eleven with the clear and restless quality of someone who had had enough sleep to be done with it and not enough to call it complete. I had gone to study. I had read. I had looked out the window for a while at the city doing its late and quietly sustained work. I had thought about several things in the particular unfocused way of thinking that happens when you are not directing your attention at anything specific, which was a mode I did not often allow myself and allowed myself more frequently now, which was itself a thing I had noted without yet fully accounting for.I had thought about the opera.I had thought about Eleanor Marsh in the lobby saying he has been watching

LENAThe message did not come from Cassie.This was the first thing I understood, and it was the thing that took the longest to settle, because it was the thing that changed the nature of what I was looking at from a nuisance into something that required a different category of response. If it had come from Cassie directly it would have been a violation of the restraining order and nothing more, the specific and manageable problem of a woman who had not yet understood the dimensions of what she had already done and was adding to the documentation in ways that would be useful to us later. I knew how to hold that. I had been holding it for months.It did not come from Cassie directly.It came from a woman named Dana Fitch, whose name I did not recognize, whose number I did not have, who sent a text to my personal cell phone at eleven forty-seven on a Tuesday morning with no preamble and no signature and the specific quality of a message that had been composed by someone who was deliveri

LENA"I know you're thinking about the sight line," I said. "About the window treatment. About what should have been done before this." I looked at him steadily. "She hired someone. She arranged this deliberately and over a period of time and with professional help. That is a thing she did. The geometry of your apartment is not something you did."He was quiet."I know," he said."You're thinking about it anyway," I said.A pause."Yes," he said.I nodded. I looked out the window. I looked at the building across the street, the south-facing tower, the floors four through seven, the specific windows that Marcus had identified with the professional certainty of a man who understood the geometry. I thought about the person who had stood there with the long lens and I thought about the morning they had captured and I thought about Cassie receiving the photograph on her phone and looking at it and deciding what it meant.I thought: she looked at that morning and she saw a threat.I thought