The Boss's Bargain

*My father built other people's dreams for thirty years, and the last thing I ever made for him was a box to put him in.* It was white oak, rift-sawn, a satin finish Marlow rubbed by hand for three straight nights. Now she runs his furniture workshop, and this morning she is back on the granite steps of First Federal Savings asking Mr. Hargrove for an extension. He doesn't hand her the usual stack of papers. He hands her a yellow envelope, the kind you'd put a sympathy card in. Fourteen days. Then the bank forecloses on the property and seizes every business asset in it. Her mother's arthritis is bad enough now that she needs both hands to lift a coffee cup. Her mother has already sold her wedding ring to cover a payment Marlow lied about. Then Cole Decker comes to the workshop with a contract. The clauses run small and legal, and the number at the bottom is one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It covers the medical debt Marlow thought was a secret, the workshop's back taxes, and the property taxes on her family home that are three months delinquent. What he wants for it: a public engagement announcement, a joint appearance at the Grand Pacific Gala, and twelve days of a woman in a flannel shirt holding his hand in front of his grandmother. Vivian has dementia. She wants to see him settled before she goes, and a hotel deed turns on whether she does. *This is a transaction. I need someone to play a role for twelve days.* So there is a photo shoot at Pike Place with a photographer calling for natural, a bundle of dahlias so dark they're almost black, an apple he polishes on his jacket and holds up to her mouth. There is a bracelet Vivian presses into her hand at dinner. And there is a man in silver-rimmed glasses by a coffee stand, phone already raised, who turns out to be named Porter Nash and to be holding a copy of an old accident report he will release on Monday unless Cole signs the hotel over to him. Marlow came for the check. What she gets is a man who has been lying for two decades standing in a kitchen deciding to stop, a grandmother who has known all along, a brother with a one-way bus ticket and a guitar held together with duct tape, and a workshop she has to choose to save rather than simply keep. A contemporary billionaire romance about debt, inherited lies and the difference between a contract and a promise, set among sawdust, tung oil and ferry water. Closed-door.