Thirty Days

The rain starts before dawn and doesn't stop.

You come down to breakfast with your phone in your pocket like a stone. You read last night's messages twice in bed, then a third time, then turned the phone face down and lay there listening to the sea until the windows went gray. You still don't know if you said too much or not enough. You only know that for the first time in three years, Lachlan Kingsley stayed up past two o'clock in the morning because of you.

"He's at the gate," Beatrice says, without looking up from her coffee.

You stop in the doorway. "What?"

"Since six." She turns a page of the Press Herald. "He hasn't buzzed. He's just sitting in his car. The groundskeeper thinks he's a reporter. I told him he's something worse."

You go to the window in the front hall. Down the long gravel drive, past the dripping hedges, beyond the iron gates, a dark gray Aston Martin sits in the rain with its engine off. Through the streaming windshield you can just make out a figure behind the wheel. Not on his phone. Not working. Just sitting there.

Waiting.

Lachlan Kingsley does not wait. Other people wait for him. That's the whole architecture of his life.

You let him wait another forty minutes. You eat a piece of toast. You drink your tea. You feel petty and magnificent and slightly sick.

Then you tell the groundskeeper to open the gate.

He stands in the front hall dripping on a two-hundred-year-old rug, and he looks at your mother's portrait for a long moment before he looks at you.

"She's beautiful," he says quietly.

"She was."

"You look like her when you're angry." He turns. Rain has soaked through the shoulders of his coat and darkened his hair to ink. "Which I suppose is most of the time I've known you. I just never noticed."

You fold your arms. "You said you wanted to talk. Talk."

Augustus has had himself wheeled into the library, and when you bring Lachlan in, the two men regard each other across the fire like two old ships of the line. Lachlan inclines his head. "Mr. Vesterberg."

"Kingsley." Augustus's eyes glitter. "You married my granddaughter without my permission."

"I didn't know she was your granddaughter."

"That," says Augustus, "is exactly my point." Then he turns his chair toward the window and pretends to be asleep, which fools no one.

You sit on the sofa. Lachlan stays standing, by the mantel, like a man before a firing squad who has refused the blindfold.

"My grandfather," he says, "didn't trust me. He thought I was cold." A faint, humorless twist of his mouth. "He was right. So he put his shares in a voting trust and wrote a condition into his will. I vote them only while I'm married. If I'm married on the morning of the centenary meeting, the trust vests in me permanently. If I'm not, it passes to my uncle."

"Mortimer," you say.

"You've met him."

"He pinched my waist at our wedding lunch and called me the acquisition."

Something dangerous flickers in Lachlan's eyes. "I didn't know that."

"You were on a call."

He takes that like a blow, and doesn't defend himself. You file that away.

"The centenary meeting," he goes on, "is nine a.m., thirty days after the gala. My grandfather's sense of theater. Twenty-seven days from today." He looks at you. "If the divorce is final before then, Mortimer takes the trust. He'll sell Kingsley to the highest bidder in pieces. Four thousand people work for that company. Dockworkers. Crane operators. Drivers. He'll gut it in a year."

"So that's why you married me. I knew that part."

"Yes." He doesn't flinch. "That's why I married you."

It's the truth. You've always known it. It still lands somewhere under your ribs and stays there.

"What do you want, Lachlan?"

He's quiet for a long moment. The rain hammers the windows.

"Thirty days," he says. "Not thirty more years. Thirty days. You come back to Louisburg Square. We appear in public as husband and wife through the centenary. The divorce is final at noon on day thirty, three hours after the trust vests. I'll sign whatever Beatrice puts in front of me, at noon, without a word." He hesitates. The great Lachlan Kingsley, hesitating. "And you can say no. I'm not ordering you. I don't have the right. I'm asking."

You stare at him.

In three years, he has never asked you for anything. Not to pass the salt. Not to stay. Not to go.

"Asking," you repeat.

"Yes."

"Say it again."

His jaw tightens. Then, very quietly: "I'm asking you, Ava."

From the window, Augustus makes a small sound that might be a cough and might be a laugh.

You make him sit down for the terms. You make Beatrice come in with a legal pad. You make him wait while you think, and he does, hands clasped between his knees, eyes on you like you're a weather system he's never seen before.

"One," you say. "Separate rooms. Same as always. That doesn't change."

"Agreed."

"Two. You ask. You never order. Not in public, not at home. If you want something from me, you ask, and if I say no, that's the answer."

A pause. "Agreed."

"Three. In public, I'll be your wife. In private, I owe you nothing. Not dinner, not conversation, not explanations."

That one costs him. You watch it cost him. "Agreed."

"Four. Vesterberg evaluates your deal on its merits. I don't do you favors because we share an address. If the numbers don't work, I vote no."

"I wouldn't want it any other way."

"Five. At noon on day thirty, you sign. No delays, no lawyers, no tricks."

"Noon on day thirty," he says. "I'll bring my own pen."

Beatrice writes it all down in elegant, merciless shorthand.

"And six." You set your teacup down. Your hand is steady. Your voice almost is. "Cordelia Lockwood returns my mother's necklace. Tonight."

Lachlan's brow creases.

"The sapphire," you say. "The one she wore to the gala. On the night of our anniversary. While you stood next to her for twenty minutes and then walked out on my toast to answer her call."

He doesn't move. His face has gone utterly blank, the way it does in negotiations when someone surprises him, and you've seen it maybe twice in three years.

"I took it to Thorncliffe's last month to fix the clasp," you say. "I never picked it up. She did. I want it back."

Silence. Even the rain seems to stop.

Lachlan looks at you, and for the first time since you've known him, he looks genuinely lost.

"Ava," he says slowly. "What necklace?"