She wrote it down that night.
She always wrote things down—it was a habit from her other life, a COO's habit, the belief that problems named were problems half-managed. She sat at the small desk in her room with a single candle and one sheet of paper and wrote what she knew on the left side and what she was considering on the right, and then she looked at it.
Left side: the entailment terms. Ninety days. Lawrence Blackwood, actively positioned. Someone deliberately compromising the estate. Samuel, no candidate, no clear path.
Right side: legal challenge—unlikely within the timeframe. Evidence against Lawrence—possible but slow. Find a candidate—
She stopped on that one. She had heard him say both, and she had heard everything the word contained.
She wrote a fourth option.
She wrote it small, in the margin, the way you write things you aren't ready to commit to the main line of argument.
Contract marriage.
She looked at it.
She thought about her life before, and what she had believed about marriage, and what she believed now—which was not so different, really. She had always been a pragmatist about institutions. Marriage as a structure, clearly defined, entered with full knowledge, with explicit terms and exit provisions—this was not a foreign concept to her. She had drafted enough partnership agreements to know that the clarity of terms was what made them survivable.
What was different here was him.
She folded the page in half, the fourth option on the inside.
She put it on the desk and went to sleep.
But in the morning, when she picked up her notebook and her keys and went to work, she knew it was still there.