The Signature Already Given

Naomi didn't tell Grant about Millbrook. Not yet. She told him half of it — the clause, the twenty-four months, the forfeiture — sitting on his kitchen counter that night while he made tea neither of them would drink.

He went very still. "That can't be right."

"I saw a copy, Grant."

"Then it's a mistake, or it's boilerplate my mother's lawyers padded in, or—" He stopped himself. Ran a hand through his hair. "My mother wouldn't do that to you."

"Your mother told me herself, this afternoon, that the last person in this position 'never even looked for the drawer.'" Naomi's voice cracked on the word drawer. "Grant, there's someone before me. Someone who—"

"Naomi." His voice had an edge now, defensive in a way she'd never heard from him. "You're talking about my family like they're — like this is some kind of conspiracy. It's a prenup. Rich families do this. It's ugly, but it's not sinister."

"Then let's just push back the signing. One week. So I can have my own lawyer look at every page."

Grant went quiet in a different way now — not angry, worse. Guilty.

"Grant?"

"I already signed my copy," he said finally. "Three weeks ago. My mother sent it over, said it was standard, said hers and my father's had looked the same. I skimmed it and signed it because I trust her, and because I was thinking about you, not about clauses."

Naomi felt the floor tilt under her. "So it's already binding on your end."

"It's binding on both our ends once you sign Thursday. Before that, it's nothing." He reached for her hand across the counter, and for a second she let him take it. "Naomi, whatever's in there, we'll fix it together. After the wedding. I'll go to my mother myself."

"After," Naomi repeated. "After I've already signed away everything if we don't have a baby in two years."

"It won't come to that."

"You don't know that. You didn't even read it."

He didn't have an answer for that. The kettle screamed behind him, and he turned to take it off the burner, and for one long moment Naomi watched the back of the man she loved and realized, with a cold clean certainty, that he had already given away his half of the decision three weeks ago without telling her — and that tomorrow at four o'clock, whatever proof she found in the next eighteen hours would have to be enough to stop this alone.