Drafting

Imogen Hart wrote prenuptial agreements for a living, and she had long ago stopped believing in marriage as a result. It was an occupational hazard, the way carpenters stop being impressed by trees. She saw the marriages of the powerful from underneath, from the foundations — the asset schedules, the sunset clauses, the carefully lawyered definitions of *infidelity* and *contribution* and *irretrievable breakdown*. She had watched couples gaze at each other across her conference table and then, in the next breath, fight for an hour over the disposition of a yacht. After eleven years, romance looked to Imogen like a very expensive way of generating billable work. She was good at it precisely because she did not believe. A believer drafts hopefully. Imogen drafted for the worst day, every time, because the worst day was the only day a prenuptial agreement was ever actually read. Sebastian Vane was shown into her office at nine. She knew the name; everyone knew the name. He developed property the way a tide develops a coastline — relentlessly, and with no apparent feeling about what had been there before. The financial press called him efficient when they liked him and ruthless when they didn't, and they used the second word more often. He was tall and unsmiling and exactly punctual, and he sat down across her conference table and placed a single sheet of paper in front of her, face down, and did not yet turn it over. "I need a prenuptial agreement," he said. "I'm getting married in eight weeks. I'd like it drafted by the best, which I'm told is you." "Congratulations." Imogen uncapped her pen. "I'll need the basics. Your intended's full name, her assets, the broad shape of what you'd both want protected. And I should say at the outset, Mr. Vane, the agreement works best when both parties have independent counsel —" "She'll have counsel. Her family will insist." He said *her family* the way other men said *the planning committee*. "Miss Hart, I'm going to be direct, because I've found it saves everyone the afternoon. This is not a romance. The woman I'm marrying is the daughter of a family that controls the harbour parcels I have spent six years trying to acquire. They will not sell. They will, however, marry. So we are marrying. The asset schedule you're about to draft is, in plain terms, the actual transaction. The wedding is the closing ceremony." Imogen had drafted for a great many cynical marriages. She was not often handed the cynicism quite so neatly, quite so unashamed. "You're describing a merger," she said. "I'm describing a merger that the law happens to call a marriage. Yes." He held her gaze, and there was nothing cruel in it, which was somehow more disconcerting than cruelty — just a flat, tired honesty, a man who had stopped expecting anyone to be moved by his life and had therefore stopped softening it. "I don't need you to approve of it. I need you to draft it well. Her family's lawyers are not gentle and I would like the worst day, if it comes, to find me prepared." "The worst day," Imogen said. "You've already named it. You haven't married her yet and you're already drafting for the divorce." "I draft for the divorce because the marriage isn't real." For just a moment something crossed his face — there and gone, fast as a bird past a window — and Imogen, who read people the way she read contracts, filed it without yet knowing what it was. "Which brings me to the reason I came to you specifically, Miss Hart, and not to one of the four other firms who would also have been adequate." He turned the single sheet of paper over. It was not an asset schedule. It was a paragraph, handwritten, in a hard precise hand — a clause, drafted in the proper form, ready to be slotted into a larger agreement. Imogen read it once, quickly, the way she read everything. Then she read it again, slowly, because the first reading had returned a result she did not believe. It was a clause about her. "Mr. Vane," she said, and found that her voice had gone very careful, the voice she used for the genuinely dangerous parts of a negotiation. "I think you'd better explain this. Slowly. And I think you'd better start with why a man getting married in eight weeks has drafted a clause naming his own lawyer — and what, exactly, you imagine I'm going to do when I finish reading it." Sebastian Vane looked at her across the conference table, across the overturned page, across eleven years of her not believing in any of this. "I imagine," he said quietly, "that you're going to tell me it's unenforceable. And then I imagine we're going to spend the next eight weeks finding out whether you're right."