Ethan
I sat with the folder long after Clara had gone, her explanation still ringing in my ears, my hands still faintly trembling from the moment I'd finally understood the full shape of everything I'd been refusing to see clearly for eighteen months.
I read through the documents a second time, alone, slower this time, forcing myself to absorb every detail rather than simply react to the shock of it. The settlement agreement. The exact figure, four million two hundred thousand dollars, that had bought my life. The seventy-two-hour deadline her parents had given her, marry Sebastian Ashford or lose the funding entirely. My chest ached reading the cold, clinical language of it, understanding for the first time exactly what kind of impossible choice had been forced on the woman I'd spent a
