Six Months to Play Fiancée:
I don’t make offers I haven’t already tested against every possible outcome first.
That’s not arrogance.
It’s survival.
Company. Calendar. Boardroom. Everything gets calculated before I speak.
So the fact that I was standing in a service hallway that smelled like champagne and floor wax, offering a fake engagement to a woman whose name I’d learned ninety seconds earlier that should tell you something about where my head was that night. Not my finest hour. Necessary one, though.
She just stared at me for a second.
“I’m sorry.” Ivy blinked. “Say that again. Slower. I think the champagne fumes back here are interfering with my common sense.”
“You heard me fine.”
“I did. I’m giving you a chance to take it back before I have to actually respond to it.”
I didn’t take it back. Honestly, I don’t know what I expected that she’d just say yes on the spot, maybe. Everyone else in my life says yes to things like this in about four seconds, because everyone else wants something from me they haven’t said out loud yet. This woman had just saved my company for free on a caterer’s wage and now she was looking at me like I’d said something mildly insulting instead of offering forty thousand dollars to solve whatever problem had followed her into that ballroom. “Let me explain the terms,” I said. “Before you decide it’s insulting.”
“Oh, it’s already insulting. I’d just like the details on top, for context.”
Fine. I could work with that.
Six months. Publicly engaged. Compensation well above whatever she was making now. Clear boundaries. An exit clause if either of us needed one. I gave her the trust situation in outline not the details, just enough that she’d get this wasn’t a whim, wasn’t some rich guy’s bored impulse. She listened the whole way through with this look on her face I wasn’t used to. Actually listening. Not the performance of listening people usually do around me, waiting for their turn to agree.
“Okay. Let me get this straight.” She crossed her arms. There was a smear of something on her wrist, frosting maybe, or wax, and she hadn’t noticed or didn’t care. “Your family’s about to hand your cousin the keys to your company unless you’re engaged. And your solution to that very serious, very expensive problem is grabbing a random woman who happened to be holding a microphone.”
“You weren’t random. You were competent. Different thing.”
“There’s also a difference between competent and willing to lie to your entire family for six months, and I haven’t confirmed I’m either.”
“I’m not asking you to audition.” Came out flatter than I meant it. Something shifted in her face at that, small, but there. “I’m offering a contract. Clearly defined terms. You’d be compensated well above market rate for your time. At the end of six months, you walk away, no further obligation to me or anyone in my family.”
“And if I say no?”
“Then I find someone else, and you go back to worrying about whatever it is you’ve clearly been worrying about all night.”
I hadn’t meant to say that much.
The words landed harder than I intended.
Her shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly, and I realized I’d guessed too close to whatever she was trying to hide.
She went quiet. Different from a minute ago.
“I don’t know what you think you saw,” she said.
“I saw a woman who improvised flawlessly under pressure for a company she doesn’t work for. Wearing shoes that don’t fit her. Who’s spent this whole conversation negotiating instead of walking out, which tells me the money matters more than the insult does.” Wasn’t trying to be cruel about it. Don’t know if I managed that or not. “I’m not asking why. Just telling you the offer stands regardless.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. Down the hall somebody yelled something about ice I decided not to ask.
“I need time to think,” she said finally.
“Tomorrow. Nine o’clock.”
I handed her my card.
“Call that number if it’s yes. If it isn’t, we pretend this conversation never happened.”
She looked at the card a long moment before pocketing it. I turned to leave, mostly because I’d already burned more time in that hallway than I could account for anywhere on my calendar, and partly because the way she was still looking at me made us want to stay a lot longer than made any sense at all.
Julian slid into the back seat after me, loosened his tie, and gave me the look that usually meant he was about to enjoy annoying me.
“So,” he said. “You disappeared during the worst PR disaster of the decade to talk to the caterer.”
“Event staff.”
“Forgive me. Event staff.” Didn’t say anything else until we were moving, which from Julian is its own kind of statement. “Eleanor called four times while you were gone. I fielded them. You’re welcome.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“That you were handling it. Which, apparently, means offering a stranger a fake engagement in a hallway that smells like shrimp cocktail.”
“How do you already know that?”
“I don’t. Guessing. You just confirmed it though, so.” Looked way too pleased with himself. “Roman. Come on. Talk to me.”
I looked out the window instead. City going by in that blur it does at night, when you’re not really looking, just letting it move past while your brain’s off somewhere else.
“By tomorrow morning, Nolan will have footage from that gala.”
“By Friday, he’ll ask the trustees to review my stability.”
“If he wins, I will spend the next year fighting my own family instead of running my company.”
“So find someone. There’s no shortage of women who’d say yes in about four seconds.”
“That’s exactly the problem.” I looked at him finally. “Anyone who’d say yes that fast is exactly the kind of person Eleanor’s lawyers tear apart in four days. No history. No ambition of her own. Somebody who folds the second a reporter asks a real question. I need someone who can hold a room. I watched a woman do exactly that tonight, in under a minute, with zero training and no authority to do it at all.”
“So she’s just a business decision.”
“That’s what I’m telling myself.”
“Yes.”
“Nothing else.”
“What else would it be?”
He didn’t answer, which from Julian is its own kind of answer too. Just looked at me a beat too long, then pulled his phone out and started typing. I let it go. Didn’t want to examine the question harder than he was clearly implying I should.
“I’ll need her to run,” I said. “Standard background. Before anything’s signed. Assuming she says yes.”
“Of course.” Didn’t look up. “Full name?”
“Ivy Calder.”
He typed it in. I watched the little wheel spin on his screen while we crossed the bridge, lights strung along the water like something off a postcard I never had time to actually look at anymore. Thought about the way she’d said I don’t know what you think you saw like I’d walked in on something she kept locked up somewhere.
I didn’t think much of it at the time. Filed her under logistics, the same category as catering contracts and press statements, because that’s how I filed everything back then. It would take me embarrassingly long to admit I’d been sorting her wrong from that very first hallway.
Eleanor called at seven the next morning. For her, that’s practically restrained.
“I watched the footage twice,” Eleanor said.
No greeting.
She’d never wasted words on greetings.
“Her name’s Ivy Calder.”
“I know her name, Roman, I have people for that.” A pause, the kind she uses like punctuation, built to make you sit in it. “Nolan will file for a stability review by Friday. You understand that.”
“I’m aware.”
“Then you understand what I’m about to ask.”
“You don’t need to ask. I’m handling it.”
“Handling it how.” Sharper now. Eleanor’s never liked a vague answer, not since I was a kid trying to explain a broken window with anything less than a full report on how it happened. “I need a wedding on the calendar within the year, Roman. Not a rumor. The trustees need stability. Not a headline.”
“I said I’m handling it.”
Silence on the line, a beat too long, the kind she does on purpose, the kind that used to get me confessing things as a kid just to fill the space. Didn’t confess anything this time. Just waited her out. She seemed to note that, because when she spoke again her voice had shifted into something almost approving.
“Bring her to the estate on Sunday.”
“If she’s going to wear this family’s ring, I want to see her before the newspapers do.”
“It’s fast.”
“So is Friday.” Then, before I could answer quieter, almost to herself, in a way I wasn’t sure she meant for me to hear at all. “Bring her anyway. I’d like to see her for myself.”
Didn’t think anything of that either. Not at the time. Hung up assuming it was just Eleanor being Eleanor thorough, controlling, unwilling to let one detail of this family’s optics slip past her. It didn’t occur to me until much later, half a year and a few devastating discoveries later, that my grandmother had asked to see Ivy Calder’s face before anyone else in this family had. And that she’d asked with an urgency that had nothing to do with optics at all.
At nine forty my phone rang. A number I didn’t recognize.
“It’s Ivy,” she said.
“From the hallway.”
There was a kettle whistling somewhere behind her.
For some reason, that ordinary little sound made her world feel dangerously easy to picture.
“I remember which Ivy.”
“Good. Because I’ve decided I’m about to do something monumentally stupid, and I need you to not make me regret it more than I already will.”
“Is that a yes?”
A pause. Something in the background, a kettle, maybe, or a radiator, some small domestic sound that made me picture a version of her life I had absolutely no business picturing.
“It’s a yes,” she said. “With rules. A lot of them.”
“I expected nothing less.”
“I mean it, Roman. This is business. That’s it. Nothing else.”
“Understood,” I said. Meant it completely, at the time the way you mean things right before life makes a fool of you for meaning them.
She hung up first. I sat in my kitchen holding a phone that had just agreed to make my problem disappear, and underneath the relief there was something I didn’t examine closely enough. Something that should’ve worried me a lot more than it did.
Julian’s background check came in that afternoon. One line flagged yellow that I read three times before I understood why it bothered me.
Julian’s report stopped me cold.
Subject’s mother: Marguerite Calder.
No verified public record before the subject’s second birthday.
I read it twice.
Closed the file.
Told myself it was a clerical error.
It was the first lie I told myself about Ivy Calder.
I stared at it for a long moment. Then closed the file. Told myself it was nothing, some clerical gap, some old paperwork error, and went back to drafting the terms of an engagement I still, at that point, genuinely believed was only paper.
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