Isabella's POV
Sophie isn't expecting anyone. I'm not expecting anyone. Everyone I know has either betrayed me or is celebrating at my stolen wedding.
"Don't answer it," I say quickly. "It's probably reporters or someone who wants to gloat."
But Sophie is already moving toward the door, checking the peephole first. Her eyebrows shoot up.
She opened the door. Then a pause — the kind of pause that happens when what's on the other side of a door doesn't match what you were expecting.
"Can I help you?" Sophie says, her voice flat with controlled surprise.
A man's voice answers. It's deep and measured and carries the particular quality of someone who is very used to being listened to.
"My name is Theodore Harrison. I'm a senior partner with Harrison and Weil, representing the Whitmore Group. I'm looking for Miss Isabella Sinclair."
****
Theodore Harrison doesn't look like a man who delivers impossible news. He looks like someone's very expensive grandfather — silver hair cut close, a suit that fits with the precision of something made specifically for him, a briefcase that probably costs more than Sophie's monthly rent and shows not a single scuff. He sits across from me at the kitchen table and opens the briefcase with two precise clicks and arranges two documents in front of him with the unhurried movement of someone who has never once been in a meeting that didn't go the way he intended.
Sophie stands in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed, watching him the way she watches anything she hasn't decided whether to trust yet.
"Miss Sinclair," Harrison begins, "twenty-seven years ago, your parents and James Whitmore entered into a formal contractual agreement. It was drawn up by their respective legal teams, notarized, and witnessed by two independent parties. I've brought you a certified copy."
He slides the first document across the table.
I look at it without picking it up. Both my mother and my father's signatures are at the bottom — I'd know my father's anywhere, the looping capital R and the way the tail of the d trails off like he couldn't be bothered to finish it. Beside it, a signature I don't recognize. Above both, dense legal language that I begin reading from the top because I need to understand every word before I react to any of it.
"The agreement," Harrison continues, "stipulated a marriage arrangement between you and the Whitmore heir — Alexander Whitmore — to be honored upon one of two conditions: your twenty-seventh birthday, or your first formal engagement to another party, whichever occurred first."
Sophie makes a sound. I don't look at her.
"Your engagement to Ethan Park," Harrison says, "triggered the second condition. You are currently twenty-six years old. The contract is fully active as of the moment that engagement was publicly announced."
I read to the bottom of the first page and flip to the second.
"My parents arranged my marriage," I say, still reading, "before I was born. Without telling me. And it was legally binding the moment I got engaged to someone else."
"In essence, yes. There is a possibility your father — since your mother is no more — hoped the contract would never need to be enforced, that you would marry Mr. Whitmore voluntarily before either condition was triggered, or that both parties would mutually agree to dissolve the arrangement. However—"
"However my engagement activated it before any of that happened."
"Correct."
I finish reading the second page and set the document down with the careful, deliberate movement of someone who is performing composure.
"And if the Sinclair family refuses to honor it?"
Harrison folds his hands on the table. "The breach-of-contract clause is extensive and explicit. In the event of a Sinclair refusal, forty percent of Sinclair Industries transfers to the Whitmore Group within ninety days of the breach being legally established. I've had four independent firms review the document in the last seventy-two hours. It is ironclad."
Forty percent. I don't need complicated math for this one. Forty percent means my father loses majority control. The board composition shifts. Everything he's built, everything he leveraged my six years and my work and my silence to protect — he loses it to the Whitmore Group anyway. Just without any negotiation and without any goodwill.
He signed this before I was born and apparently forgot it existed, or hoped it would never matter, and now it matters enormously and there is nothing he can do about it.
I feel something I wasn't expecting. Not triumph exactly. Something quieter. The sensation of a ledger balancing.
"Mr. Whitmore is downstairs," Harrison says. "He's been waiting since this morning. He'd like to speak with you directly, if you're willing."
I look toward the window. A few floors below, a black Rolls Royce sits at the curb, completely still, the kind of car that doesn't fidget or idle nervously. It just waits, like it has all the time available.
"He's been waiting since this morning?"
"Since nine a.m. He was aware you might need time to absorb the document before meeting with him."
I look at the clock. It's past one in the afternoon. He's been sitting in that car for four hours.
"Give me five minutes," I say.
In the bathroom I splash cold water on my face and look at myself in the mirror for a real moment, not a glancing one. No makeup. Dark circles that have been building for three days. Sophie's t-shirt. My hair in a knot that stopped being intentional sometime yesterday morning.
Something settles in my jaw. Not resolve exactly — something harder than resolve. The particular quality of a person who has run out of things to lose and has just realized that condition is actually a form of freedom.
I walk to the elevator and take it down alone.
The lobby is quiet at this hour. Through the glass front doors I can see the Rolls Royce, the driver standing at attention beside it, and then as I watch, the rear door opens from the inside and a man steps out.
Tall. A dark coat that sits on him with the ease of things that are custom-made. He moves with the kind of stillness that belongs to people who have never needed to fill a silence or take up more space than they meant to. He turns toward the building, and his eyes find mine through the glass before I've even pushed through the door, like he knew exactly what height to look at, exactly which frame in the lobby to watch.
I push through the doors.
Up close he's harder to look at than I was prepared for, and not in the way I expected. His face isn't soft. His expression is neutral in the way of someone who has made neutrality into a discipline — not cold, not guarded, just completely controlled. Steel-gray eyes that hold on mine without wavering or asking permission.
"Isabella Sinclair." His voice is low and certain, the voice of a person stating something they've known for a long time. "I've been waiting seventeen years to meet you again."
I go still. "Again?"
He reaches into the breast pocket of his coat and produces a photograph. Small, slightly worn at one corner, like it's been handled carefully and often. He holds it out to me.
I take it.
A funeral. Stone walls. A garden with a rosebush along the far edge. A little girl with dark hair sitting on a low stone wall, bent forward, her face in her hands. A teenage boy crouching beside her, holding something out at arm's length.
A white handkerchief.
My free hand moves to the pocket of my jeans before I've made the decision to move it.
"I don't…" My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to. "I don't remember your face. I've tried. I could never…"
"You were ten years old," he says. Not unkindly. "I didn't expect you to remember."
I look up from the photograph to his face. He's watching me with an expression I still can't fully read — somewhere between patience and something older, something that has been waiting its own length of time.
In his right hand, hanging at his side, is a square of white linen. I can just make out the corner. A thread of faded blue embroidery.
W.
******
The memory doesn't arrive gently. It hits all at once, the way grief stored too long always does — sudden and total, the past collapsing into the present without warning.
I am ten years old and it is the day of my mother's funeral and I have slipped away from the reception because the inside of the house is full of adults performing grief in ways that have nothing to do with actually missing her. I am sitting on the low stone wall beside the rosebush at the far edge of the garden, crying so hard I've stopped making sounds. Just heaving, shaking, the kind of crying that feels like something structural is giving way.
A shadow falls across me.
I look up expecting an adult with a tissue and a practiced expression.
It's a boy. Fourteen, maybe fifteen, with dark hair and the kind of serious face that belongs to someone who has had to think about things most kids his age haven't thought about yet. He doesn't say any of the things adults say. Not, she's in a better place or you need to be brave for your father or it's going to get easier. He doesn't say anything at all for a long moment. He just crouches down to my level, which puts us eye to eye, and holds out a folded square of white linen.
"It's okay to cry," he says quietly. "But you're stronger than you think you are."
I took it. I don't remember saying thank you. I was too far inside the grief to manage words. But I kept the handkerchief, and I have kept it every day since, and I have never been able to explain exactly why except that it was the only moment that day when someone treated my grief like it deserved to take up space.
I couldn't hold on to his face. Memory did what it does — kept the feeling and blurred the details, kept the kindness and lost the features. Dark-haired. Serious. Kind. That was all I ever had of him.
******
I surface back to reality, to the sidewalk, to the cold air and the noise of the city and the man standing three feet away from me who has apparently been carrying his half of that afternoon for seventeen years.
The same handkerchief is warm in my palm, pressed there without me realizing it, the same worn square of linen I reached for this morning to clean my tears.