Eve’s POV

The morning had already delivered one gut punch. I saw no reason to stop at a single blow.

After Devin dropped the revelation about my father's debt to Martin, I sat at the breakfast table for a long time, staring at the cooling eggs and trying to rearrange the shattered pieces of my life into something resembling a plan. Devin cleaned the kitchen quietly, giving me space. He knew when to push and when to hover, and right now hovering was the correct call. I could feel his presence behind me like a wall between me and the abyss.

Finally I stood up and reached for my phone. "I'm calling Marguerite Chen."

Devin turned from the sink, drying his hands on a towel. "The family judge?"

"She's the executor of my mother's will. If anyone can tell me whether that marriage clause has any flexibility, it's her." I was already scrolling through my contacts. "Maybe there's a loophole. Maybe the deadline can be extended. Maybe I can petition the court for an adjustment based on extenuating circumstances, like my fiancé being a douchebag"

"Extenuating circumstances. That's one way to put it."

"I'm being diplomatic."

Marguerite's assistant answered on the second ring. I explained who I was and what I needed, and within five minutes I had an appointment for later that morning. The speed of it should have reassured me, instead it made my stomach knot tighter. Efficient people were efficient for a reason. She knew I was coming and she had probably been expecting my call.

I hung up and found Devin watching me with that steady gaze of his. "Do you want me to come with you?"

"I think I need to do this alone."

He nodded without argument. He never pushed, never insisted. That was one of the thousand reasons I trusted him completely. "I'll be here when you get back. If you need me."

"I always need you," I said, and the words came out more honest than I intended. I grabbed my bag and headed for the door before either of us could acknowledge what I had just admitted.

Marguerite Chen's office was in a building that had been old when my mother was young. It smelled of leather and floor wax and something faintly floral that I could not identify. The walls were lined with law books that looked like they had not been opened in decades, their spines perfectly preserved, their contents probably irrelevant to anything happening in the modern world. Marguerite herself was seated behind a massive oak desk that might have been older than the building. She was a small woman, silver haired and sharp eyed, with the kind of posture that suggested she had never slouched in her life.

"Miss Lovelace," she said, gesturing to the chair across from her. "I was sorry to hear about your engagement. The circumstances were unfortunate."

"Unfortunate is a gentle word for it."

"Yes. It is." She folded her hands on the desk. "You asked about flexibility in the marriage clause. I'm afraid there is none. The will is ironclad. You must be legally married before your twenty-fifth birthday, or the entirety of your mother's estate transfers to a trust controlled by Martin Lovelace."

"Martin, my father's creditor."

Marguerite's expression did not flicker, but something in the air between us shifted. "I see you've been doing your research."

"I've been doing my surviving. There's a difference."

She leaned back in her chair and studied me with those sharp eyes. For a long moment she did not speak, and I had the uncomfortable sensation of being measured against some invisible standard.

Finally she said, "Your mother was a dear friend of mine. I have been the executor of her estate for over twenty years, and I have watched Martin and your father and a parade of lesser vultures circle your inheritance like it was already theirs. I tell you this not to frighten you, but to make something very clear."

She leaned forward. "The marriage clause is not a punishment. It is a shield. Your mother knew what would happen if you were left unprotected. She built the deadline into the will because she believed that the right partner when chosen carefully, would be your best defense against the people who want to take everything from you."

I absorbed this slowly. "So the clause was never about controlling me. It was about making sure I had someone in my corner."

"Yes, someone legally bound to protect your interests. A husband, not a boyfriend."

"Ambrose was supposed to be that person."

"Ambrose was a mistake." She said it without malice, just clinical precision. "He was a mistake your mother's will anticipated. The clause requires marriage, but it does not dictate to whom. You still have thirty days to make a better choice."

Thirty days. The number sat between us like a ticking clock. "And if I fail?"

"Martin's trust takes everything. The estate, the company, the liquid assets, all of it. You would retain a small allowance, but control would pass to him permanently. There is no appeal and no second chance."

I felt the cold certainty of it settle into my bones. This was not a negotiation. This was a gauntlet my mother had thrown down from the grave, and I was standing at the starting line with no partner, no plan and no time left to waste.

Marguerite watched me process this. Then she said, very quietly, "There is more to the will than the marriage clause. Additional protections your mother put in place. Things that will become clear when the time is right."

I frowned. "What does that mean?"

"It means your mother was a very thorough woman. She did not trust easily, and she did not leave anything to chance. The marriage deadline is not the only piece of the puzzle. But the rest is for another day."

She stood up and smoothed her jacket, a clear signal that the meeting was ending. "For now, focus on finding a partner you can trust. Someone who will stand beside you when the storm comes."

I rose from my chair, my mind already spinning with questions she clearly had no intention of answering. "Why are you telling me all this? The executor of a will is supposed to be neutral."

"I am neutral about the estate. I am not neutral about you." Marguerite's expression softened by a fraction of a degree. "Your mother would not forgive me if I failed you now. I suggest you do not fail yourself either."

I walked to the door, my hand on the brass handle, when her voice stopped me.

"Miss Lovelace."

I turned back.

"Choose your partner very carefully." Her eyes were dark and unreadable. "Not all poison comes labeled."

I stepped into the corridor and the door clicked shut behind me. The hallway was empty and silent, the old carpet muffling my footsteps as I walked toward the elevator.

My phone felt heavy in my pocket, full of people I could call and none I could trust. I had thought I had chosen carefully. I had thought Ambrose was safe, steady, unremarkable enough to be harmless but he had been a knife waiting for my back the entire time.

The elevator doors slid open and I stepped inside. My reflection stared back at me from the polished brass walls, a woman with thirty days to find a husband and no idea where to start looking. Devin would be at the apartment when I got back, ready with tea and steady reassurance and that unshakeable belief that we would figure this out.

He was the one person I could always count on. The one person who had never lied to me or let me down or asked for anything in return. The one person I could never marry, because he was gay. The idea was impossible and I was not yet desperate enough to ask that of him.

But as I kept turning Marguerite's words over in my mind, I couldn’t help but wonder what other protections my mother had hidden in that will, and what it would cost me to find out.

Eve’s POV

Scratch what I said about not being desperate. I was desperate enough but not shameless enough to ask Devin to marry me.

I spent the rest of the day doing what any reasonable woman in my position would do. I walked into every boutique between the judge's office and the river, tried on seven dresses I did not need, bought a pair of shoes that cost more than my first car, and pretended I was not circling the inevitable conclusion that had been waiting for me since the moment I walked out of that cottage.

Devin was the only man I trusted and the only man who had never let me down. My gay best friend who would rather eat glass than complicate our friendship with anything as messy as romantic feelings.

He was the perfect solution to my problems but it was impossible ask this of him.

He called twice in the afternoon. The first time I let it ring until voicemail. The second time I picked up just long enough to tell him I needed time alone to clear my head. He said okay without hesitation. He never pushed or demanded explanations. It was one of the thousand things I loved about him.

By seven o'clock I had exhausted every distraction the city had to offer and found myself in a dimly lit bar on the wrong side of midtown, the kind of place where the wine came by the glass and nobody blinked if you ordered three in a row. The bartender was a tired looking man in his fifties who had seen enough drunk women on barstools to know when to pretend he was not watching. I appreciated his discretion.

I was halfway through my second glass of something red and unpretentious when a man slid onto the stool beside me. He was handsome in a generic way, dark hair, decent jawline, a smile that suggested he had used it successfully before. "You look like someone who's had a rough week," he said.

"It's Tuesday."

"Rough month then."

I swirled my wine and considered him. He was tall and well dressed and entirely forgettable. Under different circumstances I might have been flattered. Tonight I was just exhausted. "I'm not interested," I said. "But thank you for the effort."

He did not move. "You haven't even heard my pitch."

"I don't need to hear your pitch."

"It's a good pitch. Very convincing."

I turned on my stool and looked at him properly. The wine had loosened something in my brain, a filter I usually kept firmly in place. "What's your name?"

"Eric."

"Eric, do you want to get married?"

He blinked. "Excuse me?"

“ Do you want to marry me I n the next thirty days. It's a business arrangement. You'd get a generous allowance and a quick divorce once the terms are met. No strings or expectations, just a signature on a piece of paper and a year or two of pretending." I tilted my head. "Still interested?"

Eric stared at me for a long moment. Then he laughed, a little nervously, and stood up. "You're insane," he said.

"Probably, but the offer stands."

He walked away without looking back. I could not blame him. I had just proposed a marriage of convenience to a complete stranger in a dive bar, and the only reason I was not more embarrassed was that the wine had reached the part of my brain responsible for shame and gently turned it off.

Two glasses later, Marguerite's warning came floating back to me. Not all poison comes labeled. Eric the stranger could have been anyone: A con man, a mole sent by Martin or another Ambrose with a better poker face.

I could not afford another mistake. The only person I could trust was already in my apartment, probably pacing the living room and pretending he was not worried about me.

I pulled out my phone and stared at Devin's contact photo. He was smiling in it, one of those rare unguarded moments I had captured last summer when we were on the roof of his building and the sun was setting and he had not noticed me pointing the camera at him. He looked happy. He always looked happy when he was with me.

I could not ask him. I could not take the one good friendship in my life and turn it into a transaction. And yet I had no other options. Ambrose was gone, Eric the stranger was gone and T he deadline was not going anywhere.

I ordered another glass of wine and stared at the ruby liquid like it might offer up a solution. It did not. But it did give me an idea, which was that if I was going to ask Devin Cresswell to marry me, I needed to be drunk enough that the words could actually leave my mouth.

By the time I finished my fourth glass, the bar had gotten blurry around the edges. The bartender was wiping down the counter with a rag that had seen better days, and he glanced at my phone when I set it down beside my glass. "Do you have someone who can pick you up?" he asked.

“Yes, my friend Devin. He always picks me up."

"Want me to call him?"

I nodded and pushed the phone toward him. "Tell him I have a question for him. A very important question."

The bartender scrolled through my contacts with the patience of a man who had done this exact thing for hundreds of drunk patrons before me. I watched him step aside and speak quietly into the receiver. A few minutes later he returned the phone. "He's on his way."

"He's always there for me. That's the thing about Devin." I rested my chin on my hand and felt the room tilt pleasantly. "He's the only reliable man in the world. Did you know that? The only one."

The bartender made a noncommittal sound and went back to wiping the counter.

Devin arrived faster than should have been possible in city traffic. One moment I was contemplating the dregs of my wine, and the next he was standing beside my stool, his hand gentle on my back, his voice low and steady as he thanked the bartender and settled my tab. He looked perfect in that rumpled way he always looked when he had been pulled away from something important, his shirt sleeves rolled up and his hair slightly disheveled and his eyes full of concern.

"Eve." He crouched beside me so we were at eye level. "What are you doing?"

"Drinking. Strategically."

"Strategically."

"For courage." I turned to face him and the world swayed, but he was solid, always solid. "Devin, I need to ask you something. It's insane and you're going to think I've lost my mind."

"I already think that. What is it?"

I took a deep breath. The bar was spinning gently around us. The bartender had retreated to the far end of the counter. "Marry me."

He went very still. His hand was still on my arm, his thumb resting against the inside of my wrist. "What?"

"Marry me, not for real. Well, legally real, but not romantically real and you're the only person I trust. The only one who never wanted anything from me and I have thirty days to find a husband or I lose everything. I know it's insane but you're gay so it's not like things would get complicated between us. We could just sign the papers and pretend for a while and then when the inheritance is safe we can go back to normal. Please…"

He said yes before I finished the sentence.

He said it so fast I almost missed it. Just one quiet syllable while I was still rambling, and then I stopped and stared at him and a laugh bubbled up out of my chest before I could stop it.

"Really?"

"Really."

"You'll marry me? Just like that?"

"Just like that."

I threw my arms around his neck and almost fell off the stool. He caught me, as he always did, and I laughed into his shoulder with the giddy relief of a woman who had just been handed a lifeline. "You're perfect," I said. "You're the perfect solution. My safe, perfect, uncomplicated solution."

"Uncomplicated," he repeated quietly.

"Exactly." I pulled back and beamed at him, drunk on cheap wine and sheer exhausted relief. "You're never going to fall in love with me. That's what makes it perfect. No drama, no heartbreak and no messy feelings. Just us, the way we've always been."

Devin smiled. The corners of his mouth lifted in all the right ways, but something behind his eyes did not move with them. In the dim light of the bar, with my vision blurred and my judgment thoroughly pickled, I did not notice.

"Right," he said quietly. "Never."

Devin’s POV

I stood in Eve's kitchen after she left for her appointment with Marguerite Chen and stared at the coffee maker for five full minutes without seeing it. She'd said she needed to do this alone. I understood that about her, the fierce independence that sometimes tipped into self-destruction. Push too hard and she'd pull away. So I let her go, and I cleaned her kitchen, and I checked my emails, and I pretended I wasn't counting every second until she walked back through that door.

Mark called around eleven. "The investor meeting is rescheduled for next Thursday. Your grandfather's assistant left another message. He wants to know what family emergency required you to fly across the country."

"Tell him I'll explain when I'm ready."

"He won't accept that."

"He doesn't have to accept it. He just has to live with it."

I hung up and checked my phone for the fifth time in ten minutes. Nothing from Eve. I knew she was fine. She was in a meeting and would call when she was done.

She called around noon, right when my pacing had reached the point where I was seriously considering manufacturing an excuse to show up at Marguerite Chen's office. Her name lit up the screen and I grabbed the phone before the second ring.

"Eve. How did it go."

"The clause is ironclad. There is no flexibility, I have thirty days to get married or Martin takes everything." She paused, and her voice tightened in that way it always did when she was holding something back. "Marguerite warned me to choose my next partner very carefully. Not all poison comes labeled, apparently."

"Wise woman."

"Terrifying woman. She hinted that my mother built other protections into the will but refused to explain them. I'm not sure if that makes me feel better or worse."

I leaned against the counter and stared at the skyline. "Did she give you anything useful."

"She told me to find someone I trust. The rest was riddles." Another pause. "I'm going to walk around for a while. I will window shop to clear my head. I'll be back in a few hours."

"Do you want me to join you?"

"No. I need to think. I'll call you later."

"Okay." I said it without hesitation. She was out there alone with the weight of a deadline pressing down on her shoulders, and I was here in her apartment, useless.

Two hours passed quickly. I answered emails I didn't care about, I had Mark walk me through quarterly projections for the Singapore office and absorbed none of it. I made a sandwich I did not eat and checked my phone eighteen times. Eve had not texted, had not called, had not sent so much as a single emoji.

By three o'clock the knot in my gut had blown into full anxiety. She wasn't answering my calls or reading my messages. What if she had found someone else? What if she had walked into a bar and struck up a conversation with some handsome stranger who had a nice smile and a willingness to marry an heiress in distress? What if she was sitting across from him right now, laughing at his jokes, telling him everything?

I had waited seven years for this woman. I had stood in the background of her life and watched her date a finance bro who made her yawn and an architect who bored her to sleep and a human toothache named Ambrose who had absolutely no business being within a hundred feet of her.

I had swallowed my feelings and kept my mouth shut and let her believe I was something I was not because it was the only way she would let me stay. This was my only chance to situate myself in her life firmly and I wasn’t going to let it slip through my fingers.

I called Mark. "I need you to find her."

"Find who? Miss Lovelace?"

"Yes, she went to clear her head and she's been gone three hours. I need to know where she is."

Mark's pause was pointed. "You want me to track her phone."

"I want you to send me the location of her last transaction. She's been shopping so there must be a trail."

"Sir."

"Mark."

"This won’t look good."

"I'm aware of what it looks like. Do it anyway."

He sighed, but I heard the click of his keyboard. "She used her credit card at a boutique on West Fifty-Second about forty minutes ago. There's a bar three blocks from there she's been to before. The one with the red awning. I can't guarantee she's there, but it's reasonable."

"Thank you."

"Sir, I hope you find her before you give yourself an ulcer."

I grabbed my jacket. I didn't know if she was at that bar. I didn't know if she wanted to see me. But I couldn't sit in her apartment for one more minute waiting for my future to slip through my fingers while I did nothing. I had done nothing for seven years and I was done doing nothing.

The cab ride was twenty minutes of mental torture. I rehearsed what I'd say if I found her. Something casual, something friendly. Not a confession that would send her running, and I wasn't ready to lose her.

I paid the driver and stepped onto the sidewalk. The bar with the red awning was exactly where Mark had described it, a quiet little hole in the wall with fogged windows and a neon sign flickering in the afternoon gloom. I was halfway to the door when my phone rang with a call from Eve.

"Hello."

"Is this Devin?" A man's tired, professional voice. "This is Frank, bartender at The Red Awning. I've got a young lady here who says you're her friend. She's had a few too many and asked me to call you."

My heart slammed against my ribs. "I'm already outside."

I pushed through the door and scanned the dim interior. For a moment I saw nothing but scattered drinkers nursing their glasses. Then I saw her.

Eve was perched on a stool near the back, her hair slightly disheveled and her cheeks flushed with alcohol. She was wearing the same elegant clothes from her appointment, but they were rumpled now, soft at the edges. She was staring into a glass of wine like it held the answers to every question she'd ever asked. On the stool next to her, a man was leaning in too close, and I watched with a surge of cold fury as she waved him off.

"Not interested," she said, loud enough to carry. "Also, probably insane. So really, not a good investment."

The man backed off. I crossed the room in four strides and reached her just as she turned, and her face lit up with a smile so bright and relieved it nearly knocked me backward.