The thing about leaving a small town is that it always feels like you're the one doing the abandoning.
Nora Lane stood on the porch of the only house she'd ever called home and looked at Millbrook the way you look at something you're trying to memorize. The old oak on Mrs. Petty's lawn that lost a branch every winter and somehow kept growing. The cracked sidewalk in front of the diner that nobody had fixed in fifteen years. The way the morning light came down through the hills was soft and unhurried, like it had nowhere else to be.
She'd grown up watching that light. And now she was leaving before it finished its climb.
"You're doing that thing again," said a voice behind her.
Nora turned. Her grandmother, Ruth, was standing in the doorway of her house, wearing a housecoat and slippers, holding a mug of tea with both hands, watching her with the kind of eyes that had never once missed a thing.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you stare at something so long you think it'll change its mind about you."
Nora almost smiled. Almost. "I'm not staring. I'm just—"
"Leaving," Ruth said. "And that's okay."
It wasn't okay, not exactly. Nothing about the last three weeks had been okay. The hospital bills had started arriving the same week Nora's part-time tutoring work dried up. Two clients, then three, canceled without explanation. Ruth's heart condition had gone from manageable to urgent between one appointment and the next, and the cardiologist had used words like *procedure* and *timeline* and *sooner rather than later* while Nora sat in that plastic chair and did the math in her head and kept coming up short.
Two hundred and forty thousand dollars short.
She had thirty-seven hundred in savings.
So when the man in the gray suit had walked into the diner two weeks ago and slid a business card across the table to her — *Marcus Webb, Chief Legal Counsel, Voss Industries* — she had picked it up. She'd looked at it. And then she looked at him.
"Someone wants to offer you an arrangement," he'd said, perfectly calm, like he did this sort of thing between lunch and a three o'clock call. "It would require your time, your discretion, and approximately six months of your life. In return, your grandmother's medical expenses will be covered in full, and you'll receive two hundred thousand dollars upon completion."
Nora had put the card back down on the table.
"What kind of arrangement?"
He hadn't flinched. "A social one. My employer requires a fiancée for family purposes. The position is temporary, contractual, and entirely professional."
She'd told him no.
She'd told him no again three days later when he came back.
The third time, she was sitting in the hospital parking lot at eleven at night after Ruth's consultation, and her phone showed a bank balance of thirty-six hundred and twelve dollars, and she stared at that number for a long time before she scrolled to Marcus Webb's contact and typed: *When does it start?*
---
Now she was standing on the porch at six-thirty in the morning with one suitcase and a carry-on bag and the strange, hollow feeling of someone who had already made the decision and was just waiting for her body to catch up.
Ruth came and stood beside her. She was smaller than she used to be — the illness had done that, taken something physical from her — but she still stood straight, and she still smelled like lavender and old books, and Nora breathed her in quietly.
"Tell me again what kind of job this is," Ruth said.
"Corporate assistant. For a firm in Manhattan." The lie sat flat in Nora's mouth. She'd been practicing it for a week and it still tasted wrong.
"Corporate assistant," Ruth repeated it like she was tasting it too, and finding it equally strange. "And they're paying for my hospital bills because...?"
"Comprehensive benefits package."
Ruth looked at her. Long and steady.
"Grandma—"
"I'm not arguing," Ruth said. "I just want you to remember that you can always come home. Whatever you walk into up there, whatever happens — you don't owe those people anything that costs you yourself. You hear me?"
Nora nodded. Her throat was doing something inconvenient.
"And call me on Sundays."
"Every Sunday."
Ruth squeezed her hand once, tight, and let go. That was how she said goodbye. She didn't draw things out. She'd always said that long goodbyes only made the leaving worse.
Nora picked up her suitcase and walked to the car.
---
Ethan Voss's penthouse occupied the entire top floor of a building in Midtown that didn't have the company's name on it, because men like him didn't need to announce themselves. The building just *was*, clean and glass and fifty-four stories above the street, and Marcus had to swipe a card three times before the elevator would carry Nora up to it.
She counted floors in her head to keep herself from thinking too hard about what she was doing.
The elevator opened directly into the apartment.
She stepped out and stopped.
It was the biggest interior space she had ever stood in. Floor to ceiling glass on two walls, Manhattan spread out below like something that belonged in a movie — bridges and steel and the gray morning river threading through it. Everything inside the apartment was clean, dark, deliberate. No clutter. No personality she could immediately name. Just expensive surfaces and cold perfect air and the kind of silence that felt almost aggressive.
"Don't stand in the doorway."
The voice came from the far side of the room.
He was standing at the kitchen counter with a coffee cup in hand, not looking at her. Dark suit, no tie, jacket still on at seven in the morning. Tall — she'd registered that from his photos, but photos hadn't fully prepared her for the actual proportions of him. Or for the way he looked up, finally, and fixed her with gray eyes that didn't give one single thing away.
Ethan Voss in person was not warmer than his press photos.
Nora walked fully into the apartment. The elevator closed behind her.
"You're late," he said.
She checked the time on her phone. "I'm four minutes early."
"My time starts when I expect someone. I expected you at seven." He set the cup down and looked at her — not the way people usually looked at her, like she was unremarkable background furniture, but with a flat, assessing kind of attention that made her feel like a document he was deciding whether to sign. "You're smaller than I expected."
She didn't respond to that.
"Marcus said you don't have a social media presence." Still that same flat tone. Like he was reading off a checklist.
"I don't."
"Good. You'll need to stay that way. No posting about your location, who you're with, or what you see in this apartment. Nothing. If I find out you've violated that, the contract ends immediately and you receive nothing. Are we clear?"
"We're clear."
"Your room is the second door on the left. You have your own bathroom. That side of the apartment is yours. You don't come into my office, you don't touch anything on my desk, and you don't ask me questions about my work." He picked up his coffee again. "Breakfast is not provided. There's a grocery budget on the card Marcus gave you. You buy your own food."
Nora looked at him carefully. He wasn't being cruel exactly. It was more than he was being precise — drawing borders, planting flags, making sure she understood exactly where the edges were before she had a chance to get near them.
She understood. She even respected it, a little.
That didn't mean she was going to let it land the way he intended.
"Is there a handbook," she said, "or are you going to keep listing things until one of us gets tired?"
He stopped.
It was a very brief stop — barely a second — but she caught it. The slight pause before he raised the cup to his mouth again.
"The full list of terms is in the contract you signed," he said. "Which I assume you read."
"Every line."
"Then we understand each other." He turned away from her, back toward the window, as the conversation had already ended for him. "The first event is Saturday. A dinner at my parents' house. You'll need something appropriate to wear. Marcus will handle that."
"I have clothes."
"Not for my mother's dinner table you don't." He didn't even glance back when he said it.
Nora pressed her tongue to the inside of her cheek and said nothing.
She picked up her suitcase and walked to the second door on the left.
The room was large and white and impersonal, like a hotel someone forgot to decorate. There was a window with a view of the city, and she stood at it for a moment, looking at all that glittering distance, and thought about Ruth's porch and the morning light over the hills.
Then she put her suitcase down and started unpacking.
She had six months.
She would survive him.