The bank's conference room smelled like burnt coffee and bad news.
I'd worn my father's watch that morning, the one with the cracked leather band I kept meaning to replace. Small stupid comfort. Like if I wore something of his, he might show up and fix this himself.
He didn't. He'd been gone eleven months, and Hart Restoration was going with him.
"Miss Hart." Gregory Almeida folded his hands on the table like he was praying over my company's corpse. "The bank has been more than patient. But without the Whitfield contract closing, and with the outstanding balance on the Fifth Street loan—"
"I know the numbers." I didn't need him to say them out loud. I'd memorized them at 3 a.m. for eleven months. Two hundred and forty thousand dollars. Six employees who still had my father's faith in me even though I'd started avoiding their eyes in the hallway.
"Then you understand why we can't extend further." He slid a folder across the table. Foreclosure paperwork, dressed up in polite language. "You have until Friday to arrange alternative financing, or the bank takes possession of the building and equipment."
Three days. Twelve years of my father's work, reduced to three days.
I was still staring at the folder, doing the useless math of maybe if I sell the car, maybe if Priya's catering company could front me something, when the door opened without a knock.
I'd never met Adrian Blackwood in person. I'd seen him in the business section often enough — dark suits, unreadable expression, the kind of face photographers loved because it gave them nothing to work with. In photos he looked cold. In person, he looked precise, like every motion had been costed out in advance and approved.
"Gregory." He didn't look at me yet. "I need five minutes with Miss Hart. Alone."
Almeida's whole posture changed, the way people's postures change around money that could buy their bank twice over. "Of course, Mr. Blackwood. Take the room as long as you need."
The door clicked shut. Adrian Blackwood sat down across from me, in the chair Almeida had just vacated, and finally looked at me directly. His eyes were a gray so pale it read as silver in the fluorescent light.
"You're about to lose your company," he said. Not a question.
"I'm handling it."
"You're not." He tapped the foreclosure folder without opening it. "I know what's in there. I know your balance, I know your remaining contracts, and I know your uncle removed forty thousand dollars from your operating account eleven days after your father's funeral and never accounted for it."
The floor tilted very slightly under me. "How do you know that?"
"Because I make it my business to know things other people miss." He said it the way another man might mention the weather. "I have a proposal, Miss Hart. It has nothing to do with restoration contracts."
"I'm not interested in charity."
"Good. I don't offer any." For the first time something almost like humor crossed his face, gone as fast as it came. "I'm offering a marriage. One year. In exchange, Hart Restoration's debt is cleared in full, and I personally guarantee the Whitfield contract closes on your terms, not the bank's."
I laughed — an actual, startled laugh, the first one in weeks. "You want to marry me."
"I want a wife for twelve months. There's a difference." He said it without apology. "There are conditions. We don't fall in love. We don't have children. And there is one subject you will never raise with me, under any circumstance, no matter what you hear from anyone else."
"What subject."
Something shifted behind his eyes — the first crack in all that precision. "A woman who left my life eight years ago. You will not ask about her. Not her name, not what happened, not where she is now."
I should have asked why a total stranger needed a wife badly enough to erase a quarter-million dollars of debt for one. I should have asked why me, out of every woman in this city he could have chosen instead. Later, I would understand that both questions had the same answer, and that answer was going to break something open in both our lives that neither of us could put back.
But sitting in that conference room with three days left and my father's cracked watch on my wrist, I only asked the question that mattered right then.
"And if I say no?"
"Then Friday comes, and everything your father built belongs to a bank that will sell the building to a developer within the year." He stood, buttoned his jacket, and for a moment looked almost tired — like a man who had rehearsed this conversation and hated every version of it. "I'll have my lawyer send the contract tonight. You don't have to decide anything now."
He was at the door before I found my voice.
"Why me?" I asked. "You could buy loyalty from a hundred women who'd say yes without asking a single question."
Adrian Blackwood stopped with his hand on the door. He didn't turn around.
"Because you're not going to say yes without asking questions," he said quietly. "That's exactly why it has to be you."
Then he was gone, and I was alone with a foreclosure notice, a dead father's watch, and the growing, terrifying certainty that whatever Adrian Blackwood wasn't telling me was the real reason he'd walked into that room at all.
