§1 — Hook
I do not sleep.
The guest room is on the south side of the apartment and the south side of the apartment looks at the river. At three in the morning the river looks like a piece of black tape laid down across the city. I sit in a chair I did not buy and watch the tape and run, on a loop, the conversation I had with him last night in the foyer, and the conversation I should have had with him in the foyer, and the conversation that, contractually, I am not supposed to have with him at any point in the next six months.
He had said, that's my brother.
He had said, can we not.
He had picked up the smaller of my suitcases and walked it down the hall to the south guest room, and he had set it on the bench at the foot of the bed, and he had said the bathroom is yours, the kitchen is ours, I get up at five, you won't see me. He had said all of this without looking at the photograph again. He had said all of this without looking at me at all.
The sun comes up at five fifty-two. I know because I am watching it.
I get up at six. I shower in a bathroom that has very expensive towels and one bottle of unopened shampoo, and I put on the version of myself that I wear to the Tuesday Liberty meeting, and I walk into the kitchen, and Maddox Holt is sitting at the island in a gray hoodie and reading the paper.
The paper is the actual paper. The Times. On newsprint. He has a pen in his hand. He is, I realize after a beat, doing the crossword.
He looks up.
"Coffee," he says, "is in the carafe. There is oat milk because Briggs said I should have oat milk. I do not know what oat milk is for. You can have all of it."
The hoodie is gray. The cuff has a bleach stain. I do not look at the cuff for very long.
"Good morning," I say.
"Good morning."
I pour the coffee. I do not take the oat milk. I sit on the stool that is two stools down from his stool, which is the maximum distance the kitchen island will allow without my standing up entirely, and I take the first sip.
"Five letters," he says, without looking up. "Closes the deal."
I think about it.
"Inks it."
"That's four."
"Signs."
"That's five." He writes it in. He writes in pen. "Thank you."
We sit in the kitchen of the apartment we now share and we drink coffee and he does the crossword and I do not look at the photograph in the foyer and he does not, by very visible effort, look at me, and somewhere on the East River a tugboat blows its horn, and that — that, I will say later, when I am being honest with myself, which is rarely — is the moment the contract started to crack.
§2 — Build
"We need to talk about the morning."
"Mm."
"Maddox. We need to talk about the morning."
He sets the pen down. He folds the paper in half along its existing crease, and then in quarters along a crease he makes himself, and the quarters are exactly even, and I watch him do it, and I think: this is a man who is precise about three things in his life and is choosing, at this moment, to make a newspaper one of them.
"Okay."
"You leave at five. I leave at seven. The doorman has been told we're together. The car the firm sends for me is the car that took us home last night. You take a different car to practice. So far so good. The problem is the gym."
"What gym."
"You have a private trainer who comes to the building three days a week. Briggs told me. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, six-thirty a.m. I, on those mornings, have a six a.m. call with Tokyo. The call is in the office that overlooks the gym."
"That isn't an office. It's a room with a desk in it."
"The room has a desk. It is now an office. The point is, on three mornings a week, I will be in that office, on a video call, and you will be in the room next to me, on a treadmill, in — I assume — fewer clothes than you are wearing now, and that is" — I hear my own voice do something I do not like — "that is a logistical problem we did not negotiate."
He looks at me. I look at the coffee.
"I'll move the trainer to evenings."
"You can't. You're at practice in the evenings."
"I'll do mornings at the facility."
"Briggs said you don't go to the facility on Mondays. Recovery day."
"Reagan." He says it very quietly. "Are you negotiating my workout."
"I am negotiating," I say, looking at the coffee, "the visible square footage of my colleague."
There is a silence. The silence is, I would like to point out, mine; he is the one who started it but I am the one who is sitting inside it, and I refuse, on principle, to be the one who breaks it.
He breaks it.
"Counselor," he says, and his voice has a thing in it that was not in his voice last night, "I will put on a shirt."
"Thank you."
"It will be a shirt with a Liberty logo on it."
"Naturally."
"And sleeves."
"Sleeves are good."
"And I will not, while wearing the shirt, walk past the room with the desk in it during the hours of six a.m. to seven a.m. Mondays Wednesdays Fridays."
"That is acceptable."
"And in exchange," he says, and now the thing in his voice is a thing I am going to have to think about later, in the dark, in the chair, with the river, "in exchange you will tell me what time you go for your run. So I can take a different staircase."
I look up.
"How did you know I run."
"You have shoes by the door that nobody wears to a deposition." He does not look at me. He is unfolding the paper again. "I have eyes, counselor. We're going to be married for six months. I'm going to start using them."
§3 — Twist
We are in the kitchen for forty more minutes. I do not know how forty minutes happens. The crossword is done. The coffee is done. We have, somewhere in there, drafted, on the back of an envelope, an actual schedule — a real one, not the one Briggs and Marcus drew up last week — that distributes the apartment between us in a way that lets both of us continue to be the people we are.
He writes most of it. He writes in pen. When he hands the envelope to me to add the Tuesday meeting, his hand moves across the island, and my hand moves to take the envelope, and our hands miss, the way hands miss when both people are watching something else, and the envelope falls.
He reaches for it. I reach for it.
His hand catches the corner of the envelope.
My wrist catches the back of his hand.
It is, on any reasonable reading of physical contact, the smallest thing that can be called contact at all. Three seconds. The back of his hand and the inside of my wrist. The temperature where his skin is and the temperature where mine is, and the small surprised gap between, and the fact that neither of us moves for a count I deliberately do not count to.
I am the one who moves.
I move my hand. I pick up the envelope. I set it down on the island between us, between his coffee and mine, and I do not look at him, and he does not look at me, and the tugboat on the river, somewhere, blows its horn for the second time of the morning.
"That didn't happen," I say.
"No," he says.
"That is in the contract."
"Yes."
"Section three, paragraph C."
"Subsection two."
"You read the contract."
"I read the contract, counselor."
I stand up. I am going to leave the kitchen. I am going to leave the kitchen because if I do not leave the kitchen I am going to do a thing — one thing — that no clause covers and no agency survives, and in twelve years of negotiating around things I have never once, not once, failed to leave the room when leaving the room was the deal.
I leave the kitchen.
I make it as far as the doorway.
§4 — Cliffhanger
"Reagan."
I stop.
I have been Ms. Vance in the conference room. I have been Vance in the elevator. I have been counselor — counselor, which is the word he uses the way other men use baby, the word he tucks into sentences like a coin — for two weeks, from the gala car to the kitchen island, every time he has spoken to me.
He has not, until this moment, said my first name.
I do not turn around. I cannot, yet, turn around. My hand is on the doorframe and the doorframe is cool the way wood is cool in a room that has been lived in by exactly one person for three years and has not been warmed up by a second one yet.
"Reagan," he says again. He is very careful with it. He is saying it the way he folded the paper — once along the existing crease, once along a crease of his own. "I'm not — I don't want to make this hard. I'm not going to — I'm not going to do what I just almost did. Either of us. We have the contract. The contract is the thing. I just —"
He stops. I can hear him stop. I can hear him decide whether to finish the sentence.
"I just wanted you to hear me say it once. So we both know I can. So if I never say it again, for six months, you'll know it's because I'm trying."
I close my eyes. The doorframe is still cool.
"Maddox."
"Yeah."
"You can say it once a week."
"Once a week."
"Sundays."
"Sundays."
"And not in front of Briggs."
"Never in front of Briggs."
"Okay."
"Okay."
I keep my hand on the doorframe. I keep my eyes closed. I do not turn around, because if I turn around I will see the man in the gray hoodie at the kitchen island, with his pen and his paper and his bleach-stained cuff and the wrist on which I left, three minutes ago, the temperature of mine, and I will, for the first time in twelve years of negotiating around things, not have a single move I can make that does not push back.
I keep my hand on the doorframe.
I open my eyes.
Behind me, in the kitchen, I hear him pick up the pen.