The Arrangement novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Twelve Clauses

In a flat above a shuttered chandlery, Caspar reads her the contract: no private touching, no sleepovers, no feelings. She signs, pays her tuition, and learns lunch is with the family.

The flat above the chandlery smelled like pencil shavings and old rope.

Caspar lived on Wickenden Street in Providence, over a shop that had been closed for ten years.

The sign still said Marsh & Son Ship Supply.

His front room held a drafting table the size of a door, and every wall was pinned with sea charts he had drawn by hand.

I stood in the middle of it Sunday morning in my one good blazer, holding a coffee he had made me without being asked.

"You draw maps," I said.

"Tide plates. Harbors. I sell them to an atlas publisher."

"You never leave this room?"

"I leave it for groceries."

He pushed a stapled packet across the table.

Twelve clauses.

He had typed it himself and printed it on paper so thick it felt like cloth.

"Read it out loud," I said.

"Why?"

"Because I want to hear how it sounds when a person says it."

He gave a slow blink, then picked it up.

"One. The term is one year from signing, ending on the last Kell dinner."

"Fine."

"Two. Ninety thousand dollars. Thirty at signing, thirty after the winter dinner, thirty at the end."

"By date," I said. "Not by anything I do."

"By date." He nodded. "I wrote that in three. The money is not for any act. If I end the agreement early, you keep everything paid and everything owed."

"Why would you add that?"

"Because you can walk away from me whenever you like, and I'd rather you didn't have to pay for it."

I looked at the page for a second longer than I needed to.

"Four," he went on. "You attend four dinners at Gull Point and any family event the trustee requires. You may leave any event early. You don't need a reason."

"I like four."

"Five." He cleared his throat. "No touching in private."

My face went warm.

"In public," he said, "we hold hands, we kiss if the room expects it, and I'll put my arm around you. When the door shuts, we stop."

"Because of the photographer."

"Because I don't want you to feel I bought a right to put my hands on you."

"You didn't."

"That's what the clause is for."

I let that sit.

It was the kind of sentence a decent person says, and I'd been braced for the other kind.

"Six," he said. "No sleepovers. Nobody sleeps in the other's bed or the other's flat. At Gull Point, one of us takes the floor."

"Why does it matter where I sleep?"

"If you sleep here, someone sees you leave in the morning, and Clive's man writes down the time."

"That's a reason for the investigator. What's your reason?"

He turned a page and didn't answer.

"Seven. We keep each other's secrets. Eight. Neither of us is to lie to the other about the arrangement."

"Nine?"

He took a breath.

"No feelings."

I laughed, a short, surprised bark.

"I'm serious," Caspar said. "If one of us develops feelings, the arrangement ends. You keep the money paid and owed. I lose the house."

"You lose the house if I fall for you?"

"If either of us does. It's only honest. A trustee judges 'in fact,' and I will not ask a person to stay in a lie once it stops being one."

"That's the most romantic thing I've ever heard a man say about a rule against romance."

"It was meant as a legal statement."

"I know."

I could feel my mouth trying not to smile.

The remaining clauses were housekeeping: phones, photographs, who would pay for a dress.

I added two lines in pen.

First, that I could keep studying and that he would never call my lab.

Second, that if his uncle ever touched my family, I would walk and he would let me.

He initialed both without reading them twice.

Then he held out a pen.

"You can still say no."

"I know that, too."

I signed my name at the bottom, Josephine Pennock, with the loop on the J that my mother taught me.

He signed under mine in a thin, steady hand.

At noon his phone buzzed.

"Thirty thousand," he said. "It's sent."

At 12:20 my banking app agreed.

On Monday morning I stood in the bursar's line at Bayline University with a printed receipt, and I paid nineteen thousand four hundred dollars, and I felt every muscle in my back come unclenched.

Lucy was waiting on our front step that night, when I got home from the bursar.

She had her scrubs on and my copy of the contract in her hand, since I had made the mistake of leaving it on the kitchen table.

She read the whole thing standing up.

"Clause nine," she said finally.

"It's a legal statement."

"It is a flashing sign." She dropped onto the step beside me. "Joss. You are going to fall in love with this man."

"I am going to fall in love with ninety thousand dollars."

"I'll put twenty on the man."

My phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number.

Lunch at the yacht club tomorrow, one o'clock. Clive is hosting. Wear the blazer. G.

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