Alexander's POV
She's not what I expected, and I've been building this expectation for seventeen years, so that's saying something.
I've seen the photographs — corporate events, the charity galas her father used her as decoration at, the engagement announcement that ran in three papers and landed in my inbox within minutes because I had a search alert on her name. Photographs told me she was beautiful, which is not interesting on its own. What they didn't tell me, what they couldn't tell me, is the quality of her stillness.
She stands on that sidewalk in a t-shirt and dark circled eyes and she looks at me with the focused attention of someone who has decided that what they see in the next sixty seconds is going to matter. No performance of distress. No angling for sympathy. Just assessment, direct and unblinking.
She looks down at the photograph in her hand. Something moves across her face — not breakdown, not sentiment — just the silent rearrangement that happens when a piece of your own history becomes real in a new way.
"Your handkerchief is in my pocket right now," she says, without looking up. Her voice is completely level. "I've had it for seventeen years."
"I know," I tell her. I hadn't planned to lead with that, but she's looking at the photograph and I want her to understand that I know the whole shape of this, not just the legal edge of it. "I sent Harrison when I heard what happened. I've known about your situation for some time."
That brings her eyes up. They're darker in person than in photographs, and there's something in them that is not quite anger but occupies the same territory — a wariness that's been recently tested and comes out more precise for it.
"How long is some time?" she asks.
"Long enough," I say. "My parents showed me the contract when I was fourteen. They put it on the breakfast table between the financial section and the sports page like it was a moderately interesting piece of news. They told me I'd be marrying a girl named Isabella Sinclair, that our families had arranged it when I was born, and that I should be aware of it." I pause. "They did not tell me I'd met her six months before that conversation, at a funeral, in a garden."
She doesn't move, but something in her expression adjusts.
"You remembered me," she says. "From that."
"I gave a ten-year-old girl my handkerchief at her mother's funeral. Yes. I remembered."
"For seventeen years."
"For seventeen years." I don't flinch from it. There's no version of this conversation where I make that sound less than it is, and I'm not interested in trying. "By the time I had any real opinions about the contract, I'd already been thinking about you far longer than was reasonable. So my objections were limited."
She stares at me for a moment. I can see her deciding whether to be unsettled by that or use it, and I watch her land on neither — she files it, with the careful efficiency of someone who processes information quickly and has learned not to react until she knows what to react to.
"Why come now?" she asks. "You had the contract. My engagement activated it. You could have let the lawyers run it, let my father come to you when the deadline forced him to. Why are you standing on a sidewalk in front of a building in the middle of an afternoon when you have people for this?"
"Because the lawyers would have handled the contract," I say. "They wouldn't have handled you. And those are two different things."
She looks at me.
"Come and sit," I say, nodding toward the car. "I'd rather not negotiate the terms of a marriage on a public sidewalk."
A pause. One beat, two, and then she moves toward the car without another word, which tells me what I need to know about her — she makes decisions and then commits to them. She doesn't perform reluctance.
Inside, I tell the driver to circle and I settle into the seat across from her. She sits straight, ankles crossed, hands resting open on her knees, watching me with the same focused attention she had on the sidewalk.
"Marry me," I say. "Honor the contract. One year minimum — long enough for me to satisfy the inheritance terms my father set, which require a spouse, and long enough to establish the legal record. In exchange, you receive the full protection of the Whitmore name and resources. Full financial restitution for everything Ethan Park and your father took from you. And the backing to pursue whatever legal or professional action you want to take against them."
She doesn't say anything.
"The press conference is already being prepared," I continue. "The narrative writes itself — childhood sweethearts, families joined since birth, a contract that outlasted everything. It repositions you entirely. Not as the woman who walked out of her own wedding, but as the woman who was always promised to someone else. It takes the story away from them and gives it back to you."
"And what do you want from this?" she asks. "Besides the inheritance."
She's watching me with a precision that tells me the wrong answer here costs me something significant. I consider the clean, business version of the truth and set it aside.
"The contract says you're mine," I say. "It has said so since before either of us was old enough to have an opinion about it. I've never been good at sharing what's mine, and I've had seventeen years to become even worse at it."
The car is quiet after that. She looks out the window and I watch her think — not spiral, not doubt, just actually think, which is something I've seen fewer people do than you'd expect given how often they claim to.
Then she holds out her hand, palm flat, fingers steady.
"Show me the ring."
I produce the box from my inside pocket. I had it reset three weeks ago when this became a real possibility rather than a contingency — chose a design that suited her, which required me to think carefully about what I actually knew of her, which turned out to be more than I expected. I open the box and hold it out.
She looks at it for three seconds exactly. Then her hand stays out, flat and steady.
"We have a deal," she says.
I slide the ring on her finger. My grip on her hand tightens once before I let it go, and I don't apologize for that.
"Good. Press conference is in two hours. Clara will handle everything you need before then. Is Sophie available to meet us at the salon?"
"You know Sophie's name."
"I know everything relevant to this situation. I've had time to prepare." I hold her eyes. "We are selling a love story today, Isabella. The cameras will want warmth. They'll want eye contact and proximity and the small unconscious gestures of people who know each other well. Try not to look quite so…"
"So what?"
I search for the honest word. "Prepared to dismantle something."
Her chin moves — just a fraction. "That's the face I make when I'm paying attention to something I care about."
Something shifts in my chest. Not dramatically. Just the small, specific sensation of an expectation being exceeded.
"Good," I say, and I mean it in more than one direction. "Welcome to the game."