The milk crate is not comfortable.
It never is. It's got the structural integrity of a suggestion and it leaves little grid marks on the back of Wren's thighs if she sits on it too long, which she always does because breaks at Lou's are theoretically fifteen minutes and realistically whatever Lou doesn't notice.
She's been out here eleven minutes already.
The folder is open across her knees, and the number on page six is still the same number it was the first time she read it. She keeps checking, the way you check a bill at a restaurant twice because surely it can't be right, surely you misread something, surely the universe hasn't just handed you a thing this absurd on a Tuesday morning behind a diner that smells like grease and someone else's ambition.
Five million dollars.
She says it quietly, out loud, just to hear what it sounds like.
It sounds like a mistake. It sounds like someone else's life.
The contract is eighteen pages long, which feels excessive for a fake marriage but apparently Beckett Harlow is not a man who does anything halfway, including paperwork.
Wren reads it the way she reads instruction manuals — reluctantly, thoroughly, certain she's going to miss the one crucial thing that blows everything up later. And here's the thing about this contract, the thing that keeps snagging her attention like a loose thread: it's actually fair.
Not good. Not something she'd frame on her wall. But fair.
Twelve months. One year, exactly, from the date of the civil ceremony to the date of legal dissolution. No cohabitation requirements beyond a shared address on paper and occasional public appearances — one per week, minimum, nothing overnight unless mutually agreed upon in writing. She keeps her last name in private. She changes it on documents only. At the end of twelve months, it reverts. All of it. Like it never happened.
Except for the money.
The money stays.
Five million, paid in installments — one at signing, one at the six-month mark, one at dissolution. Plus an unlimited-use credit card for personal expenses during the marriage period. The word unlimited is sitting right there in the text, in plain language, unqualified. Not subject to review. Not capped at some number that still feels like a ceiling. Just — unlimited.
She turns the page.
She turns it back.
She reads the word again.
Unlimited.
Here's the thing about numbers. They're just numbers until they're not.
Five million dollars is an abstraction until you're sitting on a milk crate doing the math in your head, and then it becomes very, very specific.
It becomes her mother's medical debt — a number Wren has memorized the way other people memorize phone numbers, because it lives in her chest like a stone she carries everywhere. Two hundred and forty-three thousand dollars. Eighteen months of treatment, of specialist visits, of a hospital system that billed with the cheerful ruthlessness of people who know you don't have a choice. Her mom is better now, mostly, carefully, the kind of better that requires maintenance and monitoring and a prescription list that takes up a full page. The debt isn't going anywhere. It just sits there, accruing its quiet interest, patient as a landlord.
It becomes three months of back rent on the apartment she shares with Dani, who has been gracious about it in the specific way of someone who is running out of grace.
It becomes the notebook under her bed. The one with the floor plans and the equipment lists and the name — Calloway & Light — written on the inside cover in her best handwriting, because if you're going to dream about something, you might as well spell it right. A photography studio. Small. Natural light. The kind of place where people come to be seen properly, not just snapped. She's been building it in that notebook for three years. She's been exactly zero steps closer for three years.
Five million dollars is the notebook becoming real.
She closes the folder.
"No," she says, to no one, to the alley, to the dumpster and the stack of flattened cardboard boxes and a sparrow who's picking at something near the drain.
The sparrow doesn't weigh in.
She almost means it.
She sits there with the folder closed across her knees and she thinks about what saying yes would actually look like. Moving into some house — mansion, probably, the man's suit cost more than her rent, she's not fooling herself — and performing the role of Beckett Harlow's wife for twelve months. Attending things. Standing next to him at those things. Pretending, in public, that she has chosen this man, that she finds him tolerable, that the specific flat gray of his eyes doesn't make her feel like she's being processed.
She thinks about the way he said please. Like it was a word in a language he was technically fluent in but had never actually needed to use.
She thinks about the fact that he brought a contract to a diner.
"No," she says again, firmer this time.
The sparrow flies away. Apparently it has better things to do.
Wren stands up, tucks the folder under her arm, and is two full steps toward the back door when her phone buzzes.
She almost ignores it. She should ignore it. She's already three minutes past her break and Marcy will give her the look, the specific look that means I covered for you and I'll keep covering for you but I need you to at least pretend to try.
She looks at the screen anyway.
Edmund H.
She stops walking.
Edmund Harlow calls her every other Thursday, usually right around the afternoon lull, and they talk for approximately twenty-five minutes about whatever he's been reading, and what she's been photographing, and whether the peach pie at Lou's has improved, which it hasn't, but he asks every time with genuine hope and she finds that one of the best things about him.
He is seventy-one years old and he orders decaf and tips thirty percent on a six-dollar coffee, and he once looked at the photograph she keeps above the register — her mom in the garden, early morning, not posed, just caught — and said, very quietly, you have the eye of a poet, you know.
She keeps that in the same place she keeps the medical debt number, but softer.
She answers.
"Edmund."
"Wren, darling." His voice is warm the way it always is, that particular warmth of a person who has decided, at some point in their life, that warmth is worth the effort. But there's something else under it today. Something tired in a way she hasn't heard before, a weight that makes the warmth sound like it's working harder than usual. "I hope I'm not interrupting."
"Just my existential crisis. Perfect timing."
He makes a sound that's almost a laugh. Almost.
"I know what my son asked of you," he says.
She's quiet.
"I know how it must look. A folder slapped down in front of a girl who's just trying to get through her shift. I know that's not — I told him—" He stops. Takes a breath. "I'm sorry for the manner of it. That's mine to apologize for, because I didn't raise him to be clinical about people. He learned that somewhere else."
"Edmund." She keeps her voice steady. "It's okay."
"It isn't, quite." A pause. "But I'm calling because I'm asking you — as your friend, Wren, not as his father — to hear him out. Properly. Not over a diner table. Somewhere you can actually talk."
She looks at the folder under her arm.
She thinks about the notebook under her bed.
She thinks about her mother's laugh, which she gets to hear all the time now, and which she is absolutely not going to connect to this conversation because that would be the most manipulative kind of math.
She does it anyway. She can't help it.
"What aren't you telling me, Edmund?" she asks.
The pause is small. Half a breath, maybe less. But she's been talking to this man for a year and a half and she knows the shape of his pauses the way she knows the shape of the burnt coffee smell — intimately, involuntarily.
This one has something in it.
"Have dinner with him," Edmund says, instead of answering. "Tomorrow. Let him explain it properly." Another pause, heavier. "There are things about the situation that are better said in person."
Wren closes her eyes.
The alley is quiet. Somewhere inside, the bell above the door jingles. Someone new, wanting something warm.
"Okay," she hears herself say.
She doesn't know if that's yes to the dinner or yes to something larger, something she hasn't agreed to yet but can already feel herself agreeing to in the slow, gravitational way of a person standing too close to the edge of something and pretending they're just admiring the view.
The folder is still under her arm.
She didn't put it down once, she realizes, during the whole conversation.
Not once.