The Terms

The offices of Hartstone Capital occupied the top four floors of a glass tower that did not, as far as Iris could tell, contain a single object that had ever been touched by a human hand. The reception desk was a slab of pale stone. The chairs were the kind that looked like sculpture and felt like punishment. Even the air had a manufactured quality, cooled and filtered until it tasted of nothing at all. She had worn her mother's grey suit. It was fifteen years out of fashion and slightly too large in the shoulders, and she had decided, somewhere on the train into the city, that she did not care. A woman did not dress to impress the man who was repossessing her life. She dressed to remind herself she had once had a life worth repossessing. "Mr. Hartstone will see you now," said the assistant, a young man with a tablet and the careful blankness of someone paid well to notice nothing. Julian Hartstone did not rise when she entered. He sat behind a desk the size of a small boat, and he did not look up from the document he was reading until she had crossed the entire length of the room, which she suspected was the point. When he finally raised his eyes, they were a flat, wintry grey, and they moved over her once — the suit, the shoes, the set of her jaw — and filed her away somewhere without apparent interest. "Miss Calloway. Sit." "I'll stand, thank you." A muscle moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. Something that had once been related to a smile, distantly, before the family connection had been severed. "As you like. You know why you're here." "I know why you think I'm here. You hold the note on Calloway Vineyards. The harvest was poor, the loan came due, and you intend to fold our land into whatever development your firm has planned for the valley." She kept her voice level. She had practiced this on the train, too. "I'm here to ask you not to." "People ask me for things all day," he said. "It rarely changes the arithmetic." "Then I won't ask. I'll listen. You didn't have your assistant book this meeting because you enjoy disappointing people in person. You want something. So tell me what it is, Mr. Hartstone, and we can both stop performing." For the first time, he looked at her as though she were a person and not a line item. He set down his pen. The silence that followed was long enough to be uncomfortable, and then long enough to be deliberate, and then he said something that rearranged the entire afternoon. "My grandfather's will," he said, "contains a clause. A controlling share of this firm passes to me on my thirty-fifth birthday, which is in fourteen months — but only if I am, at that time, married. He considered marriage a sign of stability. He considered me, I believe, a sign of the opposite." He laced his fingers together. "I have no intention of falling in love to satisfy a dead man's sentimentality. But I am willing to enter an arrangement. A marriage on paper. Eighteen months, beginning to end, after which we divorce quietly and you never see me again." Iris discovered she had sat down after all. "In exchange," he continued, "the note on your vineyard is forgiven in full. The land returns to your name, unencumbered. You would be required to live in my house, to appear with me where appearances matter, and to be — convincing. Beyond that, your time is your own." "You're offering to marry a stranger to keep your company." "I'm offering you the only version of this conversation that ends with you keeping your home." He slid a folder across the enormous desk. It came to rest precisely at the edge nearest her, as though even the furniture obeyed him. "The terms are inside. I don't expect an answer today. I expect a sensible one by Friday." Iris looked at the folder. She thought of the vineyard in October light, the rows of vines her father had walked every morning of her childhood, the small stone house where her mother's grey suit still smelled faintly of the cedar wardrobe. She thought of how much she had sworn she would never sell. "I don't need until Friday," she said. Julian Hartstone raised an eyebrow, and waited, and for one absurd moment she had the satisfaction of being the one who made him wait.