Chapter 1: Clause Seven

CLAUSE 7. The Parties shall not develop romantic feelings for one another during the Term. No penalty is attached to breach of this clause, as breach is not anticipated.

June Hale read it three times.

The first time she laughed, a short ugly sound that made the lawyer across the table look up from his tablet. The second time she didn't laugh. The third time she put her finger under the words breach is not anticipated and held it there, as if the sentence might try to leave.

"Who wrote this one?"

"Ms Shaw drafted Clause Seven personally." The lawyer was in his fifties, silver at the temples, with the kind of tie that cost more than June's rent. His name was Mr Okafor. He had introduced himself twice, which June took to mean he didn't think she'd remember. "Most of the agreement is standard. That clause is hers."

"It's a joke."

"Ms Shaw doesn't make jokes."

He said it the way a man might say the sun rises in the east, and went back to his tablet.

The conference room was on the forty-first floor of Shaw Biotech's tower on the river, and the whole far wall was glass. It was raining. Not the clean kind of rain that makes a city look washed — the grey, sideways, November kind that made June's one good coat feel like a wet dog on her shoulders. Below, the river was the colour of old pewter. She could see her own reflection floating over it, small and creased, a twenty-seven-year-old woman in a cardigan she'd bought for her cousin's wedding four years ago.

She turned the page.

The money was on page four. She'd already read page four. She'd read page four in the lift on the way up, and then again in the bathroom on the forty-first floor, sitting on the closed lid of a toilet that was cleaner than her kitchen, holding the paper with both hands.

Compensation: USD 2,400,000, payable in three instalments.

First instalment payable upon signature.

Eighteen months. One marriage certificate. Two signatures.

She'd done the maths on the back of a receipt. It came out to $4,383 a day, which was more than she'd made in all of September, which was the month she'd sold three commissions and a set of greeting cards and still had to borrow forty dollars from Toby's nurse for the bus.

"Ms Hale," Mr Okafor said. "If you have questions about the terms, I can—"

The door opened.

June didn't see who it was at first, because she was looking at the river. She felt it, though. The room changed temperature the way a kitchen does when someone opens the freezer. Mr Okafor stood up so fast his chair rolled backwards into the glass.

"Ms Shaw."

Vivian Shaw was thirty-two years old and ran a company with eleven thousand employees, and June had seen her face perhaps four hundred times — on the business pages, on the side of a bus, on the cover of a magazine in her dentist's waiting room under the headline THE COLDEST WOMAN IN BIOTECH. The pictures were wrong. Not inaccurate, exactly. Just lacking. They got the cheekbones and the black hair cut sharp at the jaw and the eyes that were the grey of the rain outside. They didn't get how still she was. She stood in the doorway in a charcoal coat with rain on the shoulders and didn't move at all, and the stillness had a weight to it, like a held breath.

She looked at June for one second.

Then she looked at Mr Okafor.

"Has she signed."

It was not quite a question. Her voice was lower than June expected, and very even.

"Not yet. Ms Hale was reviewing Clause Seven."

Vivian's eyes came back to June. Two seconds this time.

"It's not negotiable."

"I didn't ask to negotiate it," June said. "I asked who wrote it."

Something happened at the corner of Vivian Shaw's mouth. It was so small June would later wonder if she'd imagined it — a tightening, there and gone, like a curtain moving in a window when nobody's supposed to be home.

"I did."

"I could tell."

Mr Okafor made a sound like a man swallowing a cough drop whole.

Vivian walked to the head of the table. She didn't sit. She put one hand flat on the wood — long fingers, no rings, nails short and unpainted — and looked down at June the way June imagined she looked at quarterly reports.

"You've read the rest."

"Yes."

"Questions."

June had a list. She'd written it on her phone on the bus. Why me. Why marriage. Why now. Why does a woman with eleven thousand employees and a face on the side of the number 9 bus need to rent a wife from the clearance rack.

What came out was: "Do I have to change my name?"

"No."

"Do I have to live with you?"

"Yes. Separate floors."

"Separate floors?"

"The apartment has three."

June opened her mouth, then closed it. Of course it did. Of course Vivian Shaw lived somewhere that had floors the way other people had cupboards.

"Do I have to—" She stopped. Her face was getting hot. She could feel it climb up from her collar, which was the most humiliating thing a body could do, and hers did it constantly. "Is there anything else I'd have to—"

"No." The word came quickly. Faster than the others. Vivian's hand lifted off the table, then pressed back down. "Clause Nine. Physical contact limited to what is necessary in public. Hand-holding. An arm. Nothing that requires your consent beyond this signature."

"And what's necessary in public?"

"I'll tell you when it's necessary."

Of course you will, June thought. Of course the human iceberg has a schedule for hand-holding.

"Okay," she said out loud.

Vivian looked at her. Three seconds.

"Okay?"

"Okay, I understand. Not okay, I'm signing." June took a breath. "Why me? You could hire an actress. You could marry one of the eleven thousand. You could — I don't know, put an ad on LinkedIn. Seeking spouse, must be emotionally unavailable, competitive salary. Why the illustrator who's three months behind on her phone bill?"

Mr Okafor looked at the ceiling as though something important was happening up there.

Vivian Shaw said nothing for a long time.

It was, June would later calculate, about eleven seconds, which is an extraordinarily long time to watch someone not speak. Outside, the rain thickened. A tugboat went down the river with its lights on in the middle of the afternoon. Vivian's eyes were on June's hands, which were holding the contract, and June became very aware of the ink stain on her right middle finger and the chipped green polish on her thumb.

"My grandfather's will," Vivian said finally, "transfers his voting shares to me on the condition that I am married at the time of the board vote. The vote is in eighteen months. I need a spouse who will not want anything from me other than what is written on page four. You need eight hundred and twelve thousand dollars by the end of the month."

The air went out of June.

She hadn't said that number. She hadn't said it to Mr Okafor, or to the woman from the agency who'd first called her, or to anyone in this building. She'd said it to exactly three people: the billing department at St Columba's, her landlord, and Toby, who had laughed and said well, that's that, then, and turned his face to the wall.

"How do you know that."

"I had you checked."

"You had me checked."

"Everyone on the shortlist was checked."

"How many people were on the shortlist?"

"One."

June stared at her.

Vivian looked back. Her face showed nothing at all. Not apology, not satisfaction. A woman reading out the weather.

She's insane, June thought. She's a billionaire and she's insane and she's offering me Toby's kidney in a manila folder.

And then, underneath it, quieter and much worse: A shortlist of one.

"Why," June said again, and her voice came out smaller than she meant it to.

"Because you won't want anything else." Vivian's hand left the table. She put it in her coat pocket. "Sign or don't, Ms Hale. I have a call at three."

That was the moment. June knew it even while it was happening — the way you sometimes know, halfway down a staircase, that you've missed a step and your foot is about to meet air. She could stand up. She could leave the folder on the table and take the lift forty-one floors down and walk out into the rain and call the billing department and ask, for the sixth time, about payment plans.

Toby had been on dialysis for nineteen months. He was twenty-four. He'd been an apprentice electrician. He had stopped asking her how the money was going about six weeks ago, and that was what frightened her most.

She picked up the pen.

It was heavy and cold and probably worth more than her laptop. She signed on page eleven, where the little yellow tab said SIGN HERE, and initialled pages one through ten, and when she got to page three — Clause Seven — she paused with the nib above the paper.

Breach is not anticipated.

She initialled it. Hard. The pen went almost through the paper.

"Done," she said, and pushed the folder across the table.

Vivian didn't pick it up. Mr Okafor did, checked every page with a speed that suggested he'd done this many times before with documents that weren't marriages, and nodded once.

"The registry appointment is Thursday," he said. "Ten o'clock. A car will collect you at nine-fifteen. Wear what you like."

"Thursday." June laughed again, the ugly one. "Sure. Why not. I didn't have plans."

Vivian was already turning toward the door. Halfway there, she stopped.

She didn't look back. She stood with her face to the door and her hand in her pocket, and the room was so quiet June could hear the rain ticking against the glass.

"Ms Hale."

"Yes?"

A pause. One second. Two.

"The cardigan is fine," Vivian Shaw said, "for Thursday."

And she left.

June sat there with her mouth open. Mr Okafor cleared his throat, collected his tablet, told her the car would be black, and left too.

She was alone on the forty-first floor with the river and the rain.

The cardigan is fine. What did that mean? Was it an insult? It sounded like an insult. It sounded like the kind of thing a woman like that would say about a cardigan like this. June looked down at herself — the bobbled sleeves, the button she'd sewn back on with the wrong colour thread — and felt her face go hot again.

She was halfway down in the lift when her phone buzzed.

She almost didn't look. It would be the phone company. It was always the phone company.

It wasn't.

It was her bank. Her actual bank, the one whose app she opened with her eyes half shut, the one that had sent her four overdraft notices since August.

Payment received.
USD 812,000.00
From: SHAW, V.
Reference: For Toby.

The lift doors opened on the lobby. People walked in. Someone said excuse me twice. June didn't move.

She had not said his name.

Not once. Not in that room, not to the agency, not on any form. She was sure of it the way she was sure of her own phone number.

She stood in the lift with the doors trying to close on her shoulder, staring at two words she hadn't given anyone, and somewhere forty-one floors above her a woman who didn't make jokes was getting into a car for a three o'clock call.