He didn't acknowledge it. Not in the first meeting, not in the second. He was "Mr. Cole" — polite, professional, precise. He outlined the arrangement with the efficiency of a man conducting a business transaction: a legal marriage for the purposes of visa sponsorship, a monthly allowance, separate bedrooms, a twelve-month minimum term.

I sat across from him in his penthouse and I studied his face and I looked for Nathan. He was there — in the set of his jaw, in the way he held his coffee cup, in the particular stillness he had when he was thinking hard about something. But he was also different. Harder. More certain. The Nathan I had known had been uncertain in the way of someone who had never been allowed to make his own choices. This man made choices the way other people breathed.

I agreed to the arrangement. What else was I going to do? I needed the visa. He was offering a clean, compensated solution. The fact that he was my ex-husband was — I told myself — irrelevant.

On the third day of our arrangement, I came home to find his mother in the penthouse.

She recognized me immediately. Her face went through three expressions in rapid succession — shock, calculation, and then a smooth, practiced warmth that I had learned, over three years, to distrust completely.