Chapter 3
I didn't sleep until four in the morning, and when I did, I dreamed about a pay phone.
---
Ten years.
That's how long I'd been carrying Joe Bennett around in my chest like a stone I'd swallowed and couldn't pass.
We'd met at sixteen, in the back row of AP Chemistry, when he'd leaned over and whispered that the teacher's toupee was slowly migrating north. I'd laughed so hard I'd knocked my textbook off the desk. He'd picked it up without being asked. That was it. That was all it took. Sixteen years old and I was done.
I applied to Whitmore University because Joe applied to Whitmore University. I told my parents it was for the art program. The art program was fine. Joe was the reason.
College was four years of watching him from the wrong angle.
Freshman year, he dated a girl named Priya who wore his lacrosse hoodie to every party. Sophomore year, a girl named Becca who laughed at everything he said. Junior year, two girls whose names I never learned because I stopped keeping track. I was always there — in the same friend group, at the same tables, in the same lecture halls — and he always looked at me like I was furniture he liked. Comfortable. Familiar. Not something you take home.
I told myself I was over it so many times the words lost their shape.
Senior year, I stopped texting him first. I stopped showing up to the group dinners. I stopped engineering reasons to be in the same room. It took everything I had, and it felt like quitting a drug cold, and I was three weeks into it when my phone rang.
"Fi. Hey. You okay? You've been weird."
"I'm fine."
"You haven't texted me in like three weeks."
"I've been busy."
"Busy." He said it like the word was a joke. "Come on. What's going on?"
I was sitting on the floor of my dorm room with my back against the radiator. The radiator was warm. I remember that. I remember thinking, *just hang up. Just hang up and you'll be fine.*
"Nothing's going on, Joe."
"You're lying."
"I'm not."
"Fi." His voice dropped. "Talk to me."
And that was the thing about Joe. He could do that — drop his voice half a register and suddenly you were the only two people in the world. I'd watched him do it with Priya, with Becca, with all of them, and I'd told myself I was immune.
I was not immune.
My throat tightened. My eyes burned. I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and breathed through my nose and told myself, *do not cry, do not cry, do not—*
"You don't like me," I said. My voice came out wrecked. "You never liked me. And I — I don't like you anymore either. So I'm done. I'm just done."
Silence on his end. Three seconds. Five.
Then I heard him stand up — the creak of his desk chair — and I heard his door open and close, and his footsteps in the hall, and then my own door opened because I'd never locked it, and he was there, in my doorway, phone still in his hand, looking at me on the floor with an expression I'd never seen on his face before.
He crossed the room in four steps and pulled me up by the wrist and wrapped both arms around me, and I stood there with my hands at my sides like an idiot, not hugging back, because I was so shocked I'd forgotten how arms worked.
"I like you," he said into my hair. "I've always liked you. I just didn't know how to say it."
I should have asked why. I should have asked why three years of other girls, why now, why only when I was walking away. I should have said a lot of things.
Instead I put my arms around him and held on.
---
He told me, early on, that he wanted to keep things quiet.
"Just between us," he said. "Relationships are private. I don't want to perform it for everyone."
It sounded reasonable. It sounded mature. I was twenty-one and in love and I believed him.
Three years. No photos together. No social media. No meeting each other's families. When his friends asked, he said we were close. When my parents asked, I said I was single, because what was I supposed to say — *we're together but he won't let me prove it?*
My parents arranged dates. I went to some of them to keep the peace, sat across from men I didn't look at, and came home and called Joe and he'd laugh and say, *you're too good for all of them, Fi.* And I'd feel warm and chosen and I wouldn't ask the question that was always sitting at the back of my throat.
*Then why won't you just say so?*
The answer, I know now, was that he never intended to. I was the girl he kept in a drawer — useful, available, easy to close away when something shinier came along.
Marcus called on a Tuesday.
"Lunch," he said. "Just us. That Thai place you like on 54th."
I almost said no. I'd been saying no to most things since the night Joe's text had glowed up at me from the nightstand. But Marcus was the only one in that family who still called me by my name without a pause before it, so I went.
He was already at the table when I arrived, jacket folded over the back of his chair, looking tired in the way he always looked tired now — like he was carrying something he hadn't put down in years.
"You look thin," he said.
"You look old."
He smiled. It didn't reach his eyes. "Sit down."
I sat. The waiter brought water. Marcus waited until the waiter left.
"Mom and Dad want to arrange another introduction."
My stomach dropped. "Marcus—"
"I know." He held up one hand. "I know. But they're not going to stop, Fi. You know that. And the last two were—" He stopped. Pressed his lips together. "I'm trying to make this one better."
"Better how."
"He's not sixty-three. He's not a stranger. He's someone I know. Someone I trust." He turned his water glass in a slow circle. "His name is Edward Smith."
The name meant nothing to me. I looked at my brother's face and tried to read it.
"He knows the situation," Marcus said. "He knows about Elena, about the family, about—" A pause. "About what Dad tried to do before. He's not interested in any of that. He just wants to meet you."
"Why."
"Because I asked him to."
I looked down at the table. There was a small crack in the lacquer near my placemat, a thin white line running from the edge toward the center. I traced it with my thumbnail.
"I don't want to be sold again, Marcus."
"You won't be." His voice was quiet. Certain. "I promise you that."
I didn't answer. The restaurant was warm and smelled like lemongrass and somewhere behind me a child was laughing at something, a high bright sound that bounced off the low ceiling.
"Just meet him," Marcus said. "One lunch. If you hate him, I'll never bring it up again."
---
He was already there when I arrived.
I'd expected someone like the man in my father's photograph — older, soft around the edges, with the particular confidence of someone who'd bought his way into every room he'd ever entered. I'd worn a dress I didn't care about and flat shoes and I'd told myself it would be over in an hour.
The man at the table stood when he saw me.
He was tall. Dark jacket, no tie, the kind of easy posture that doesn't come from trying. His face was — I registered it the way you register a fact, not a feeling — good. Structured. The kind of face that looked like it had been through something and come out the other side without apology.
He extended his hand.
"Miss Lockwood." His voice was even. "I'm Edward."
I shook it. His grip was firm and brief and he let go first.
We sat. Marcus, to his credit, kept the conversation moving for the first ten minutes — work, the neighborhood, a renovation project Marcus was overseeing. Edward answered in full sentences and asked questions that showed he'd actually listened to the answers. He didn't look at me the way men usually looked at me in these situations, like I was a property they were inspecting.
He looked at me like I was a person.
I didn't know what to do with that.
The food came. Marcus excused himself — *bathroom, two minutes* — and I watched him go with the specific suspicion of a woman who knows her brother too well.
Edward didn't fill the silence with noise. He just picked up his chopsticks and waited.
"He's not coming back for a while, is he," I said.
"Probably not."
I looked at him directly for the first time. "So what is this, actually."
"Lunch." The corner of his mouth moved. "And an honest conversation, if you want one."
"I want one."
He set the chopsticks down. His eyes were steady on mine — dark, unhurried, the kind of eyes that had decided something before they walked in the door.
"Your brother told me what your family has been doing," he said. "I'm not here to continue that. I'm not here to buy anything or negotiate anything." A pause. "I'm here because Marcus said you needed a way out, and I have one to offer."
My chest tightened. I kept my face still.
"Marry me, Miss Lockwood." He said it the way you state a fact — no performance, no flourish. "I'll take you out of this. Whatever they're holding over you, whatever arrangement they're trying to force — it ends. You'd have my name, my resources, and my word that I won't ask for anything you don't choose to give."
The restaurant noise continued around us. Chopsticks, laughter, the hiss of a wok somewhere in the kitchen.
I stared at him.
He reached into his jacket pocket and set something on the table between us — a business card, plain white, his name and a number, nothing else. He slid it toward me with two fingers and left it there.
"Take your time," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."
I looked down at the card. The edges were sharp and clean. His name was printed in plain black type, no flourish, no title.
*Edward Smith.*
My thumbnail found the crack in the lacquer again. I pressed into it.
"Why," I said. "Why would you do this."
He was quiet for a moment. Not evasive — thinking.
"Because I can," he said finally. "And because someone should."
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