Page 6 of The Marriage Clause

I glance around his room—the warm lighting, the quilt I made him last Christmas, the photo of my mother on the nightstand, the schedule board where Lena tracks his therapy milestones. He’s walking to the bathroom without a cane now. His good days outnumber the bad ones three to one. Last Tuesday, he remembered my birthday without being reminded.

Two to three years. That’s all. Two to three more years here, and he could be living his own life again.

There is no Plan B. He has to stay here if I want any chance of getting him back and for him to have a full life again.

"I’m not going anywhere, Dad. Neither are you. You promised me you would take me to the French Riviera yourself and show me where you met Mom, remember?"

He studies me for a long moment, then pats my cheek. "I do. You look just like her, you know?"

Out of all the things he’s forgotten, including his own name, he’s never forgotten my mother, and that’s the greatest gift.

I stay for another hour. He tells me about his friend Pearl, who apparently cheated at cards again yesterday, and I pretend to be scandalized while he describes her technique with the enthusiasm of a man who respects a good hustle. He tells me about Martin, who’s been stealing extra Jello from the nurses’ station late at night. When I finally leave, I sit in my car for a long time, staring at the steering wheel while Seattle rain hammers the windshield.

One thought keeps circling, refusing to quit. As much as I want to quit and tell Everett what he can do with his coffee cup, this job is the only means by which I can afford Brookhaven.

I need this job more than I need my dignity.

I have to make Everett see that I’m not redundant.

Chapter Two

EVERETT

I wake up angry.

Not at anyone in particular—just at the fact that it’s barely five a.m. and my mind feels like it’s already halfway through a twelve-hour board meeting.

The sun is just barely rising over Seattle’s skyline. It's a dark jagged line beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows on the top floor of the Kauffman Enterprises tower. One of eight penthouses in this sky-rise.

I should feel calmer up here than I do. Instead, my chest feels tight. That same knowing tightness that I can never fully escape. The tightness that starts behind the sternum and radiates outward like cracks in glass.

Not now.

I shove back the duvet and sit on the edge of the bed, elbows on my knees, fingers digging into the back of my neck. My heart is already doing that thing—the stutter-skip, the too-fast rhythm that has nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with the fact that my brain has decided, at five in the goddamn morning, to track every single thing I’m about to lose.

I close my eyes.

Four counts in. Hold for seven. Out for eight.

Dr. Meyers taught me this sophomore year at Stanford, back when I was having three of these a week and convinced I was dying of a heart condition. Turns out I wasn’t dying. I was just a twenty-year-old carrying the expectations of a mother who paraded me around like a trained show pony and the legacy of a father I’d never met. The heart was fine. The wiring behind it was shot.

After a couple of years of therapy with Dr. Meyers, I figured out how to keep things from escalating to a panic attack. I hadn’t had a panic attack since. Until five years ago, when I got the call. Conrad Kauffman had died, and I was now the acting patriarch of a family I had never met—six brothers, a sister, and a multi-billion-dollar enterprise I knew nothing about how to run.

Four in. Seven hold. Eight out.

The technique works most of the time. Not always. Sometimes it wins anyway and I just lie there until it’s done, alone, jaw locked, hands fisted in whatever’s closest—sheets, steering wheel, the edge of a boardroom table. Nobody sees those moments. Nobody knows they exist. And that’s how it stays.

Tonight—this morning—it’s manageable. The breathing catches the edge of it, blunts it, pushes it back down into the place where I keep everything that doesn’t belong in daylight. My heartbeat evens out. The tightness loosens its grip. Not gone—never fully gone—but contained.

I let out a slow breath. Open my eyes.

I have weeks to get married, or my siblings and I lose everything.

What kind of egomaniac conceives eight children for the sake of legacy, doesn’t bother to raise a single one of them, and then chains their futures to a marriage clause? Sure, he threw money at our mothers to raise us. Private schools, whatever we needed. My mother got the best deal of anyone—a Kauffman son, firstborn, the heir she could mold and present to Conrad like a trophy. She drilled perfection into me like it was a language I had to be fluent in by age ten. Straight posture. Right answers. Impressive handshake. Impress your father, Everett. Make him see what I gave him. As if I existed to validate her choices rather than live my own life.

Have any of us ever had a real conversation with the man?

No.