Seeing the man rubbing his fingers, casually accounting for Richard's remaining lifespan as though it were loose change, Richard asked: "You're the devil, aren't you."
The man scoffed — a short, dismissive sound. "Don't think about who I am. Don't guess at things beyond your pay grade." He reached into his left coat pocket and produced a cigarette, already lit, glowing like a small cosmic wonder. "Want one?" he offered.
"I want six months this time," Richard said.
The man paused for one second, considering. "Eighteen months from you, then." He mysteriously produced the same contract Richard had signed before, new clauses already filling themselves in, and held out the pen. "Sign it. I have other deals to make."
Richard took the paper. This time his hands were still. He read the new clauses as they appeared, signed without hesitation, and watched the contract burn to ash. Then he grabbed the man's hand immediately, as if he might disappear before the shake was complete.
Ring! Ring!
The smartphone pulled him back. He woke, arranged his bedsheets, and stood under the shower for a long time, letting the water drain his exhaustion. He was tired in a way that went beyond the physical — tired from the previous five years, from living them twice, from carrying the weight of knowing. He felt himself ageing spiritually, even as his body remained in its prime. There was an unexplainable ache in him, a restlessness that sleep didn't touch.
He just wanted some time with Jessica before the next step.
She had gone to her parents and would be back by evening. They had been together five years by her count — more than ten by his, practically more than half his life as he now experienced it. He had always carried the thought of proposing at the back of his mind, always filed under later, and then later had become the night she collapsed and their world fell apart.
Not this time.
He dressed in his best clothes and drove to the jeweller's.
Last time, he had spent days agonising — comparing cuts, negotiating prices, second-guessing himself across four shops. This time he walked in and pointed directly at the ring in the expensive case. Blue sapphire, the colour of deep water, silver metalwork making it look like a broken piece of star that had fallen specifically for Jessica. He paid without asking the price and watched it get packed into its case.
On the way home he bought a bottle of McGlaggen whiskey — her favourite — a bouquet of roses and lilies, and the Biscoff lotus cheesecake from the bakery she had mentioned wanting to try. He remembered everything now. That was the deal's side effect nobody had warned him about.
Jessica arrived home tired from the journey, the familiar weakness in her body that she managed quietly and didn't complain about. Her book was still a work in progress she intended to finish one day. Richard was the stable thing in her life and she was looking forward to seeing him.
The house was pitch dark from outside. She unlocked the door and reached for the light switch.
"Surprise!"
The disco lights erupted. Her closest friends materialised from every corner. Someone appeared with a tray carrying the cheesecake, which she saw before she saw anything else and which immediately threatened to derail the entire evening. She gathered herself and looked around the room.
"Where is he?"
The friends went quiet. The television flickered on — her favourite song, and then a slideshow of photographs: the time she had attempted to cook a meal for Richard and the evidence had been extensive, the time she had fallen asleep writing on the sofa with her pen still in her hand, the laughing off-camera shots where neither of them knew the photo was being taken. Every memorable moment collaged into colour.
The back doors opened. Two people held them wide. The garden was lined with roses and lilies, held by friends arranged in a corridor leading to the centre, where Richard stood in his black suit and white gloves — looking, she thought, exactly like the protagonist of her novel, the one who always arrived when the story needed him most.
She was still taking this in when the drone appeared overhead, its neon sign glowing clearly in the evening air.
Will you marry me?
She crossed the garden in six steps and wrapped her arms around him. "Yes. Yes, I absolutely will."
He bent to one knee anyway, because it was the right way to do it, and offered the ring. She held out her hand. The sapphire caught the light like something that had always belonged there.
They drank the whiskey. They ate an unreasonable amount of cheesecake. Her friends stayed well past midnight and nobody wanted to be the one to leave first. The hangovers the next morning were, by all accounts, substantial.
They were lying in bed that night when Richard said, "I've spoken to your parents. We can marry this week — I know it's sudden."
He was prepared to explain himself further. Jessica reached for her notebook before he finished the sentence and started planning the wedding. That was her answer.
The following month they were married in a castle in the south of France that cost everything they had saved and was worth every euro. Families only, close friends, a string quartet that Jessica hadn't known about until she walked into the room. There was an ice sculpture carved in the shape of a rose. The wedding cake was in the shape of a pen. Jessica saw it and laughed — a real, surprised laugh — and Richard thought: twenty more days. Make them count.
The celebration was everything. Liquor, steak, dancing, the kind of noise that means something. At some point Jessica worried aloud she was going to get fat. He told her she was catastrophising. She threw the bouquet at him in mock outrage. He caught it.
One day she was his girlfriend. The next month she was his wife. Things were moving at rocket speed and she was his, and he watched her sleeping peacefully that night and wished it could remain exactly like this — the same still moment, indefinitely.
But Jessica would be hospitalised in twenty days. He could not prevent it. He had thought about telling her — the disease, the mysterious man, the contracts, all of it — but it would serve no purpose and cost her the peace she had left. He kept his silence and took her to Paris instead.
The finances were burning fast and he didn't care. The Eiffel Tower, the French cuisine, the beautiful infrastructure of a city that had been designed for exactly this kind of moment — it was worth it entirely. They danced in a club and it turned into a friendly competition neither of them would admit to losing. They played pranks on each other in the hotel. He watched her writing in her notebook on a café terrace, probably absorbing the city for her novel, and didn't interrupt.
He had to make every second count — not only for her, but for himself.
On the twentieth day, she collapsed in his arms.
He caught her cleanly, avoiding any injury, and got her to the hospital with the route etched in his memory. The doctors explained the condition. He sat beside his unconscious wife and gave her hand a single gentle squeeze.
Their parents arrived pale and sick with worry, filling the waiting room with the particular silence of people who had partly prepared for this and found the preparation had helped nothing.
Richard went outside.
He sat on the bench by the entrance and took the cigarette from his pocket — the one he had carried for the entire six months, taken from the man at the second deal, still unsmoked until now. He lit it. It tasted like nothing he could name.
The fog arrived before the footsteps did. Visibility dropped to almost nothing, and then through it came that precise, measured sound — the same unhurried pace, the same beat.
The man in the black suit looked at him. "Six months, then. Do you want more time?"
Richard drew on the cigarette, let the smoke out slowly. "How much life have I traded?"
The man reached into his coat, produced his notebook, and glasses appeared from nowhere. He put them on with the unhurried precision of someone who enjoys the theatre of his own competence. "Twenty years from the first deal. Eighteen months from the second. Total: twenty-one and a half years surrendered." He looked up. "You have roughly fifty years remaining. Plenty of inventory to work with." He hissed slightly. "The rate increases with each deal, of course." He rubbed his fingers together.
"Tell me the rate," Richard said.
"Four years of yours for one year of hers."
Richard dropped the cigarette and ground it out under his heel.
"Trade it all."
The man went perfectly still — not the frozen-corridor stillness of stopped time, but something different. Something that looked, briefly, like genuine surprise.
Then he started laughing. A real laugh, unperformed, the laugh of someone caught off guard by something that genuinely delights them. Richard looked at him, and then at the absurdity of where he was and what he was doing and who he was doing it with, and started laughing too.
The man laid the contract on his knee. The clauses filled in. "Your soul will be mine for eternity," he said, still smiling. "I have a great many plans for it."
"I'm sure you do," Richard said. "Aren't you curious whether I care?"
"Four years for one," the man said. "Everything remaining. You understand what that means."
"Fuck you," Richard said, with complete sincerity and no malice whatsoever, and signed.
The paper burned. He shook the man's hand. The man held it a moment longer than necessary.
"Better make it worth it for her," the man said, looking somewhere past Richard's shoulder, at nothing in particular.
"I intend to," Richard said.
And then —