Schedule B

Breakfast is soft eggs, toast with too much butter, and coffee with cream and no sugar.

It's waiting on the kitchen island at seven when you come out in the robe from your bathroom door, eyes swollen from a night of not sleeping. One plate. One cup. A folded note in sharp, slanting handwriting.

I'm told I can't cook. I'm told correctly. Radek's mother made these. She's terrifying. Eat them anyway. M.

You eat them standing up, looking at the Corvina letter flattened under the sugar bowl. Fourteen companies. Your name. You read it again by daylight, as if the sun might change the words.

It doesn't.

At 7:40 your phone rings. Connecticut.

"Mrs. Delaune." Theodora Ruskin doesn't believe in greetings. "I've had a night to think, and I've thought of a better question. What do you know about the Meridian fund?"

Halden Meridian. The flagship. When you were a junior analyst on the credit desk, Meridian was the fund everyone wanted to work on, the one that paid for the marble in the lobby.

"I left the firm five years ago," you say. "I don't know anything current."

"Hm. Meridian lost a great deal of money in 2023. Everyone knows that. A short seller made a mess of its biggest position. What nobody knows is why the losses on paper look so much smaller than the losses in the air." A pause. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

You do. Your stomach turns over. "Someone moved them."

"Someone moved them. And my auditors say the trail runs through a set of private companies with a pretty name. Something to do with a fish." Paper rustles. "Corvina."

The coffee goes cold in your hand.

"Mrs. Ruskin, I have to go."

"I'm sure you do," says Theodora Ruskin. "Call me when you know something, Ava. I'm seventy-two. I don't have time for anyone else's lies."

Delaune Capital occupies floors 40 through 44. You've never been inside. Bryce used to say it looked like a nightclub run by accountants.

He wasn't wrong. Dark wood, low light, glass walls, young men and women in very good shoes moving fast and quiet. The receptionist on 44 takes one look at your face, which has been in every paper this morning, and stands up.

"Mrs. Delaune. Mr. Delaune is in a meeting. Can I bring you..."

"Which way?"

She points before she can stop herself.

You walk down a glass corridor with your letter in your hand. You pass an office where a pale blond man in rimless glasses looks up from his screens and watches you with no expression at all, cold as a closed bank. You keep going.

The door at the end has no nameplate. It isn't locked. You push it open.

It isn't Max's office.

It's a war room. A long table covered in binders, three screens on the wall, a whiteboard the size of a garage door. And across the top of the whiteboard, in thick black marker:

PROJECT TIDEWATER.

Under it, an org chart you know better than your own family tree. Arvid Halden, chairman. Bryce Halden, CEO. Victor Osterman, general counsel. The board. The big investors, Theodora Ruskin's fund circled twice in red.

On the center screen, a slide frozen mid-presentation.

TENDER OFFER FOR ALL OUTSTANDING SHARES OF HALDEN GROUP. LAUNCH: Q1. ANTICIPATED BOARD RESISTANCE: HIGH.

The spring merger.

His board wants him married before a merger in the spring, he said, on the courthouse steps. And you thought: a press release. A respectable wife for a deal.

The deal is your ex-husband's company.

"I was going to tell you, Ava," says Max behind you. "I'd have liked you to hear it in a nicer room."

You turn. He's in the doorway in shirtsleeves, a pen in one hand, and he doesn't look caught. He looks like a man who's been waiting for this door to open.

"A hostile takeover," you say. "Of Halden Group."

"Yes."

"And you married Bryce Halden's wife the morning he divorced her. In front of half the photographers in New York."

"Yes."

"Do you know what that looks like to his investors? A CEO so busy he lost his wife to the man trying to buy his company?" Your voice is rising. You let it. "Theodora Ruskin has called me twice. They're all calling me. That's not an accident. That's strategy. I'm the strategy."

"It helps Tidewater," Max says evenly. "I won't insult you by saying it doesn't."

"So that's what I'm for. The rest of the contract. Schedule B." You laugh, and it hurts. "Let me guess. Appear at board dinners. Say lovely things about you in the press. Don't speak to my ex-husband without your lawyers present."

He looks at you for a long moment. Then he walks to the table, opens a slim black folder sitting apart from the binders, and takes out a single sheet of paper.

"It came from the lawyers this morning," he says. "I was going to give it to you with dinner."

He holds it out.

You snatch it. The heading matches the contract. SCHEDULE B. THE WIFE'S OBLIGATIONS.

Under it, centered on the page, one word.

None.

You stare at it. You turn it over. The back is blank.

"This is a mistake."

"It isn't."

"Every contract has obligations. It's a contract. Something for something."

"Read it again, Ava," Max says quietly. "All thirty pages. You're good at it."

You don't need to. Your memory, the analyst's memory you thought you'd buried under five years of charity luncheons, pulls up the pages on its own. The husband shall provide. The husband shall represent. The husband shall protect. The husband may not end this agreement. The wife may, at any time, for any reason.

Every clause binds him.

None bind you.

"Why?" you whisper.

He leans against the edge of the war table, the whiteboard behind him with your ex-husband's name on it, and for once he doesn't smile.

"Because I didn't marry you to own you," says Maximilian Delaune. "There are enough men in that building across the street who think they did."

You look down at the page in your hands.

He's going to take Halden Group apart in the spring. He married you on the morning that made it easiest. And in thirty pages of contract, he never asked you for a single thing.