The Boss's Contract

Molly presses the heels of her hands against her eyes until stars bloom behind the lids. Twenty-three hours since she last slept. Maybe twenty-four. In the bed, Lily's chest rises and falls. The oxygen cannula has left pink marks on her cheeks again, and the sunflower scarf stays on because Lily insists, even in a Seattle November that has not produced sun in two weeks. Their parents' insurance is maxed. The fundraiser stalled at thirty-two thousand. The savings are gone, so is the retirement account, so is what was left of the college fund. Lily needs a bone marrow transplant, the match has been found, and the procedure costs $150,000 at minimum. On the television at the nurses' station, a reporter is explaining that Grant Remington has sixty days to produce a fiancee or lose the acquisition that saves his career, because the founder he is buying from only does business with grounded family men, and Remington has been famously single since Vivian Blair. Molly works at Halcyon Design. She goes into Remington Industries to win a design contract, prepared, direct, with a compliance audit ready. He tells her the wireframes are clean and the information architecture is derivative. Then he tells her she is not getting the job. *Because I don't need a designer. I need something else.* Seventy-five thousand on signature. Seventy-five thousand more if she can survive ninety days. One rule. *Never fall in love with me.* She laughs at that, bitter as broken glass, because her heart is not the organ at risk here. What goes wrong goes wrong in ordinary ways. Vera Kim has sat three desks away since they both started at Halcyon, and a friend in Legal sends her a photograph of the contract's letterhead as a joke, and Vera's price is partnership. Leo Torres knows something and is being gracious about it for now. Vivian Blair looks Molly over at a museum gala, laughs like breaking glass, and says she has teeth. And Grant keeps turning up at a hospital door with a yellow isolation sign on it, which no clause in the agreement requires of him. The arrangement has a clean exit and an expiry date. What it does not have is a provision for a man walking into a donor chair and letting a centrifuge separate stem cells out of his blood for the sister of a woman who once stood at a graveside and promised she would handle all of it alone. This is contemporary romance of the fake-engagement, boss-and-employee kind: a signed arrangement, a deadline on both sides, a sister in Room 412, and a rule that does not hold. It is closed-door.