Forty-Seven Pages

The contract arrives at eleven in the morning and I clear my schedule by eleven-oh-four.

Not because it's urgent. Because I want to read it alone. Without Miles hovering. Without the office noise, the telemetry feeds, the constant operational hum of a company that's eleven weeks from insolvency. I want silence and the contract and no witnesses to whatever my face does when I read what she wrote.

I close the office door. Lock it. The lock makes a sound that's either decisive or cowardly — the two aren't always separable.

The document is forty-seven pages. I know this because the first thing I do is count. That's who I am. A man who counts pages before reading them, who assesses the weight of a thing before he knows what it says, who needs the variable quantified before he can feel it.

Forty-seven pages.

She wrote forty-seven pages of terms, conditions, and limitations to describe six months of pretending we're in love.

I sit. Lean back. The leather creaks — this chair was my father's, the same way the watch was my father's, the same way this office was my father's before it became mine and stopped being anything he'd recognize. I sign anyway.

Forty-seven pages. Every clause a bruise. Every term a wall she built to protect herself from the man who left.

I'm not leaving again.

But she doesn't know that yet. The contract doesn't cover it. There's no clause for I'm going to spend the next six months proving that I'm worth the risk you took by saying yes.

There should be.

Maybe I'll write it in the margins.

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