All Chapters of Terms & Conditions : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

# Chapter Two: Cade CapitalThe car Harriet Voss sent was a black Escalade with a driver who didn't make small talk, which Ivy was grateful for, because she spent the entire ride uptown rehearsing and discarding approximately forty different opening lines for a conversation she had no script for. *Hi, I hear you need a wife.* *So, marriage.* *I brought nothing, like your lawyer said, but I do have several questions, starting with are you insane.*By the time the car pulled up outside a black glass tower on Fifty-Third with CADE CAPITAL etched into brushed steel above the entrance, she'd landed on nothing better than silence, which turned out to be the right call, because the moment she stepped out of the elevator on the forty-second floor, she forgot every word she'd ever known.Not because he was handsome. Although — fine. He was.It was that the entire floor went quiet when the elevator doors opened, the way a kitchen goes quiet for the chef during service, twenty people at desks an

# Chapter Four: Her TermsHarriet Voss's office at ten a.m. looked different than it had the day before — not the room, which was exactly as glass and quiet as Ivy remembered, but the energy in it, which had shifted from *interview* to *machinery already in motion.* There was a folder on the desk with Ivy's name typed on the tab. There was a second chair pulled up beside Harriet's, occupied.Julian stood when Ivy came in. He was in another slate-colored suit, or possibly the same one — she suspected he owned several identical to avoid the burden of choosing — and he looked, for just a moment, like he hadn't fully expected her to actually show up."Ms. Reyes," Harriet said, gesturing her into the chair across from both of them. "I understand congratulations are premature, but I do believe we should discuss terms in detail before either of you signs anything. This isn't the sort of document either of you should feel rushed through.""I have some changes," Ivy said, before she'd fully sa

# Chapter Six: The Cover StoryIvy had rehearsed the lie on the subway ride home, the way she'd rehearsed everything else this week — turning it over, testing which parts sounded true, sanding down the edges that felt too much like something out of a soap opera. By the time she walked into the apartment, she almost believed it herself, which she suspected was the only way it was going to work on anyone else.Her mother was at the stove, still in her hospital-admin cardigan, the good one with the missing button she never got around to replacing, stirring something that smelled like garlic and adobo and every version of home Ivy had ever known. Bea was at the kitchen table, laptop open, looking marginally more alert than she had in days."There she is," Corazon said, not turning around. "You're smiling. That's new."Ivy hadn't realized she was smiling. She set her bag down and tried to figure out, in real time, whether that was nerves or something else."I have news," she said.Bea clos

# Chapter Eight: TribecaThe wedding was scheduled for the following week — Harriet had moved with a speed that made Ivy's head spin, city hall paperwork expedited by someone who clearly had a favor or two banked with the right clerk's office — which meant that before Ivy could marry a man she'd known for exactly nine days, she needed to see, at least once, the place she'd be living in for the next two years.Julian sent a car. He didn't come himself, which Ivy noticed and didn't fully know what to make of — whether it was consideration, giving her space to see the place without an audience, or simply the schedule of a man who ran a company and hadn't thought to block off the hour.The building was on a quiet street in Tribeca, cobblestones underneath, a converted warehouse turned into six enormous residences, the kind of building Ivy had walked past a hundred times without ever imagining she'd have a key. The doorman knew her name before she said it — *Ms. Reyes, Mr. Cade said to exp

# Chapter Ten: House RulesMoving in took less time than Ivy expected, mostly because she didn't own much worth moving. Two suitcases of clothes, a box of kitchen things she refused to leave behind even though the Tribeca kitchen was better equipped than most professional ones she'd worked in, and a milk crate of cookbooks with cracked spines and handwritten notes in the margins, inherited from a grandmother she barely remembered and a culinary program she'd dropped out of when the tuition bills stopped making sense.Julian had cleared an entire closet for her without asking what she'd need, which turned out to be roughly a tenth of the space, and Ivy stood in the doorway of her new room that first evening surrounded by boxes that looked small and slightly embarrassed against the scale of everything around them."You can use more of the apartment than just this room," Julian said, appearing in the hallway with the particular awkwardness of a man who wasn't used to having anyone to che