Remarried After I Secretly Divorced the CEO novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Terms

In Max's penthouse she signs a contract engagement with a wedding date, and Odile texts that Kieran has bought her building.

Max Thorpe lived at the top of a glass building in Belltown, in a penthouse with a kitchen the size of my studio.

He took off his jacket, threw it over a chair, and opened a bottle of sparkling water with the air of a man mixing a martini.

"You were magnificent," he said. "You called him a decree."

"I said it was a decree."

"Same thing. Sit. We need to talk about the terms."

I sat on a white sofa that cost more than my car.

On the coffee table lay a contract in a black folder, twelve pages, tabbed in yellow.

I looked at the yellow tabs.

I looked at them for a long moment.

"What's wrong?" Max asked.

"Nothing. Where do I sign?"

"Read first. I'm told it's a good habit."

I read it.

It was clean and short, and it said what we had agreed over four coffees in the past month.

For eight weeks, I would be his fiancee in every photograph, every dinner and every room that contained a banker.

Harcourt's review of Thorpe Group closed on August fifteenth, and the chairman wanted the wedding set for the sixteenth.

On the morning of the sixteenth, the wedding would be postponed for a family illness, and by autumn we would announce a gentle split.

Thorpe Group's bank, Harcourt, would keep its four-hundred-million-dollar line open.

And Bishop Studio's credit, which three banks had frozen since I left Kieran, would sit under Max's guarantee for as long as the engagement lasted.

Nine people drew their salaries from that credit.

I thought of them whenever I wanted to throw the ring into the Sound.

"Why does the bank care?" I asked, for the fourth time.

"Because Harcourt is seventy years old and thinks a man who goes to bed alone is a man who gambles."

"You do go to bed alone."

"I go to bed with spreadsheets, which is worse." He sat across from me and put his elbows on his knees. "The chairman asked me at lunch in February whether I intended to settle down. I said soon. He said he'd extend the line for settled men."

"And you thought of a stranger."

"I thought of an architect whose work I have admired for four years."

"Whose work you've admired under another woman's name."

"Whose work I knew by the corners," he said. "Nobody puts a corner like that in a building by accident. I figured out whose it was in a week."

I had not expected it, and it landed somewhere warm and sore.

"Victoria told those banks my studio borrowed Saxon work," I said.

"I know. That's why I took the credit. She will say it louder when she hears about the ring."

"She'll say it on camera."

"Then we'll want a lawyer, a good one."

"No lawyers," I said. "I want my name on every sheet of Harbor Tower. Lead architect, in print, on the drawings and the plaque."

"It is already on the rendering."

"On the permit set. On the building. When it's done, I want to stand in front of it and have it be mine."

"Done," Max said. "I'd have offered it if you'd let me finish."

We went through the rest.

Separate rooms, in the penthouse's second wing.

Cheek kisses for the cameras, hand-holding for the bank, nothing more unless a photographer was within a hundred feet.

No lies to our families, which was easy for him and hard for me, because mine was a mother in Tacoma who thought Kieran was a rumor.

No falling in love.

"I added that one for me," Max said gravely. "You're terrifying."

"Thank you."

"It was a compliment."

I laughed.

It surprised me, and he looked pleased.

"There's one more thing," he said. "Kieran and I were friends once. Twenty-two years old, Stanford, a shared apartment."

"I didn't know that."

"Nobody does. We built a business plan on a napkin and a site came up in Ballard. He won it from under me."

"He never told me."

"I'm not surprised." He picked up a pen and held it out. "He and I have hated each other for nine years in the best way. You should know I'll enjoy what happened today more than I should."

I took the pen.

For a second I thought of a man signing a stack of papers at a kitchen island, never looking up.

I signed every page, and I read each line before I did it.

When I was done, Max turned the folder around and signed too.

Then he reached into his pocket and took out a small velvet box.

"Back to the ring. It was my grandmother's. I would like it back in the autumn."

"It's very large."

"She was a very large woman." He took my hand and turned the stone to the light. "Eight weeks, Ellery. You will hate it, and then it will be over."

My phone buzzed against the cushion.

It was a text from a number I knew by heart.

Odile Saxon, seventy-eight years old, who had never once typed a message with correct punctuation.

It said, "he bought your building."

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