Ana Reyes agreed to marry a stranger on page forty-one, somewhere between the indemnity section and a paragraph about who would keep the dog.
There was no dog. She checked. The contract simply assumed that a Hartley might acquire one during the marriage and wanted it settled in advance, the way it wanted everything settled in advance.
One hundred and twelve pages. She had read all of them in the waiting room of Okafor and Lindqvist, forty-fourth floor, with a pencil she had borrowed from the receptionist and never intended to return.
Through the frosted glass of the next office, the man she was about to marry was on the phone. She couldn't hear words. She could hear the tone. It was the tone of someone buying a small country and finding the price acceptable.
Page forty-one, clause nine: The parties agree that no genuine romantic feelings shall arise from or be pursued within the marriage.
She underlined it twice.
Sensible. Clean. Doable. She had planned two hundred and six weddings in her career and had watched genuine romantic feelings ruin at least forty of them. A marriage without any sounded restful.
"Ms. Reyes?" The receptionist had a headset and the expression of a woman who had seen many brides sign many things. "Mr. Okafor will see you now. Can I get you anything? Water? Sparkling? We have a cucumber one."
"I'm fine. Thank you."
"You've been here three hours."
"It's a long contract."
"Nobody reads it," the receptionist said, almost kindly. "They just sign the little flags."
Ana looked down at the little flags, yellow and sticky and hopeful, marking every place her name was supposed to go. Then she looked at her pencil notes crawling up every margin.
"I plan weddings for a living," she said. "I read everything. Last June a groom's mother tried to slip a clause about the seating chart into a catering agreement. I caught it on page nine."
"What happened to the groom?"
"He married the wrong cousin. Not my department."
The receptionist laughed, surprised, and showed her in.
Graham Okafor was tall and grey and dressed like a closing argument. He shook her hand and pulled out a chair. Behind him, the city spread to the river in squares of glass and copper roof, and somewhere down there, nine blocks south and a world away, her father was pulling the second batch of conchas out of an oven that had been dying since February.
"Mr. Hartley will join us in a moment," Okafor said. "He's finishing with Singapore."
"All of it?"
"Most of it." He didn't smile. She liked him for that. "Before he comes in, I'm obliged to repeat the terms aloud. You understand that the marriage will last exactly one year from the date of the ceremony."
"I understand."
"That you will reside at the Hartley residence, attend no fewer than eleven formal social functions, and present to the public, the press and the family as a devoted spouse."
"Devoted," Ana said. "Got it."
"That upon successful completion, you will receive a settlement of one point two million dollars, payable within ten business days."
She kept her face still. She had practised it in the mirror that morning, saying the number until it stopped sounding like a joke. One point two million. The bakery's back rent was sixty-one thousand. The new oven, the good one, the one her father looked at in the supplier catalogue the way other men looked at sports cars, was forty-four. The rest was a lifetime of not lying awake doing arithmetic.
"And that in exchange," Okafor went on, "Mr. Hartley will satisfy the marital condition of his late grandfather's will and retain control of Hartley Hotels."
"Which is the part where I become a Hartley."
"Legally. Temporarily. Yes."
The frosted door opened.
She had met Dominic Hartley exactly twice. The first time, he had been a dark shape at the back of a ballroom during a charity dinner she was running, at the precise moment the ice sculpture of a swan lost its neck. She had caught the head before it hit the dessert table and handed it to a waiter like a baby, and when she turned around, the dark shape was watching her with an expression she could only describe as appraisal.
The second time, he had sat across from her in a café she couldn't afford and proposed a business arrangement without once raising his voice or touching his coffee.
This was the third time. He was taller than she remembered. Dark three-piece suit, no tie, the kind of stillness that made other people talk too much to fill it. He had grey eyes, very light, and they went first to her face and then, without permission, to the contract under her hand.
"You read it," he said.
"Every page."
"Nobody reads it."
"So I've heard."
He came around the desk and stood beside her chair. She thought he would sit. Instead he tilted his head and read her pencil notes upside down, quickly, one margin after another, the way she imagined he read quarterly reports and people.
Page twelve: who pays for my dry cleaning at galas? Page thirty: define "reasonable notice." Page sixty-seven: I will not be learning to sail.
Then page forty-one. Her double underline.
He looked at it for a long moment. Something moved at the corner of his mouth, and it took her a full second to understand that Dominic Hartley, who had been described in a business magazine as "temperature: arctic," was about to smile.
He did. It changed his entire face. It was a crooked, private, very slightly wicked smile, and it was aimed straight at her.
"You found the loophole," he said.
Ana frowned up at him. "What loophole?"
Okafor made a small sound, like a man watching a glass slide toward a table edge.
"Clause nine," said Dominic Hartley, "has no penalty."
She looked back at the page. He was right. Every other clause had a consequence attached: forfeiture, reduction, termination. Clause nine just sat there in the middle of page forty-one, firm and sensible and completely unenforceable.
"So if I break it," she said slowly, "nothing happens to me."
"Nothing at all."
"And if you break it?"
He picked up her pencil, the one she had stolen from the receptionist, and turned it once between his fingers. Then he set it down precisely parallel to the contract.
"I didn't think I'd need one," he said. "Sign wherever you like, Ms. Reyes. The wedding is in nine days."