The lawyer's office was all glass and steel, the kind of room designed to make you feel small. Elise sat in the hard chair, pen poised above the contract, staring at her own name typed across the page like it belonged to a stranger.
Elise Margaret Calloway to Sebastian James Harlow.
Marriage. For money. Specifically, for two hundred thousand pounds, distributed to her mother's hospital in installments over the next three years.
Her mother didn't know that part yet.
"The terms are straightforward," the lawyer continued, droning through words Elise had already read five times. Surrogate wife. Public appearances only. Eighteen months minimum. Grounds for immediate dissolution if either party violates the discretion clause.
She was twenty-six years old, trained since childhood to perform grace under pressure—concertos, family dinners while her father's fraud unraveled, her mother's deterioration—and she had never felt less graceful than she did right now.
The door opened.
Sebastian Harlow walked in ten minutes late. No apology. No acknowledgment of his own tardiness. He wore a suit that probably cost more than Elise's entire university education and carried his phone like it was his actual heartbeat.
He didn't look at her.
"Are we done?" he asked the lawyer.
Done. As if Elise wasn't there. As if they were discussing a contract amendment, not binding their lives together for the next year and a half.
The lawyer gestured toward the signature line. Sebastian approached, didn't sit, and signed with the kind of efficient scrawl that suggested he signed things without reading them all the time. Probably he did.
Then he shook Elise's hand.
His grip was firm and cold, the kind of handshake given to business associates, not to the woman you'd legally married thirty seconds ago. His eyes didn't quite land on her face.
"My grandmother expects appearances," he said, and it wasn't cruel, which somehow made it worse. Cruelty required acknowledgment. This was simple indifference. "Charity events. Family dinners. Nothing too demanding. Beyond that, stay out of my way."
Elise smiled. She had trained for this moment her entire life—the smile that held nothing, revealed nothing, asked for nothing.
"Of course," she said.
"Your mother's first payment posts tonight," he continued, already turning away. "You'll be moved into the estate by tomorrow. Mrs. Doyle will handle the details."
He was leaving. They had just signed a marriage contract and he was leaving.
"Mr. Harlow," she said quietly.
He paused. Didn't turn around, just glanced back over his shoulder.
"Is there anything you'd like to know about me?" She asked it with genuine curiosity, as if the answer didn't matter to her. As if she hadn't spent the last three months researching him—Harlow Capital's stock performance, his mother's death when he was seventeen, his obsession with Catherine Leigh, the woman he'd apparently wanted to marry before whatever happened to them.
He considered this for half a second. "No."
Then he turned back to his phone and walked out.
The silence he left behind was enormous.
Elise sat alone in the glass office while London moved on outside the windows. She looked at her signature on the contract—the same careful cursive she'd used for concert programs and thank-you notes and all the small civilized performances of her life.
She told herself firmly: don't feel a thing.
Don't feel the humiliation. Don't feel the desperation. Don't feel the particular sting of being married to a man who couldn't even pretend to see you.
Her mother's heart medication was being funded. That was the agreement. That was the only thing that mattered.
She was standing to leave when Sebastian's phone buzzed on the table.
He'd left it behind.
Elise wasn't the kind of woman who looked at other people's phones. But she was alone, and the screen lit up bright, and the name on it was impossible to miss:
CATHERINE
And then, the preview of the message: "Miss you. When can I see you?"
Elise stared at it. At the name. At the way the phone automatically displayed his last message to Catherine—sent that morning—a single word: "Soon."
She was still staring when she heard his footsteps returning.
Sebastian appeared in the doorway, saw his phone in her vision, and something flickered across his face. Not guilt exactly. More like annoyance at being caught thinking about Catherine when he was supposed to be leaving.
He crossed the room and picked up the phone without meeting Elise's eyes.
"The estate driver will collect you tomorrow at ten," he said. "Pack light."
He was already scrolling through Catherine's message, his jaw tightening slightly. Then his whole expression changed. He smiled—a real smile, the kind she'd never seen on his face before—and texted something back.
Not at her.
Never at her.
When he left the second time, Elise stayed in the cold glass office for another five minutes, staring at the marriage contract with her careful signature on it.
She had married him to save her mother's life.
He had married her because someone named Catherine had broken his heart, and a marriage to a stranger was apparently easier than admitting it.
The lawyer had left a pen on the table. Elise picked it up and looked at her own name again.
Then she whispered it to the empty room, not as a question but as a promise: "Don't need him."
But even as she said it, she could still see him smiling at Catherine's name.
And something in her chest twisted in a way that felt dangerously close to the beginning of feeling everything.