She had agreed to marry him because she thought six months of borrowed companionship might be easier to survive than the future she had been handed. That was the truth stripped bare. Eight months before, a doctor had sat across from her in an exam room that smelled like antiseptic and printer toner and said words like hypertension, cardiac strain, serious, early intervention, lifestyle overhaul, risk. She had nodded through all of it like an obedient student. Then she had gone home to her apartment in Queens, locked the door, and sat on the kitchen floor until the linoleum pattern blurred under tears she had not planned to shed.
She had tried after that. God, she had tried. Better food. Walking. Medication. Tracking numbers. Facing mirrors less often. Enduring the bright, fake cheerfulness of health advice from people who had never had to carry the kind of loneliness that made change feel like lifting concrete with bare hands. Then Eric White had found her through a fundraiser connection, half awkward, half strangely earnest, and explained the bet with enough embarrassment to make her believe he hadn’t invented it as a joke.
He had expected her to refuse.
Instead she had asked practical questions.
Will he treat me decently?
I think so.
Will he tell me the truth?
I told him he had to.
Will it stay private?
As private as marriages involving Taylor King ever do.
She had known it was humiliating. She had known it was foolish. But there was a part of her—small, tired, shamefully hopeful—that wanted six months inside a life where she would not come home to silence every night. Six months of being chosen, even artificially. Six months of pretending the ring meant something while her future felt like it was narrowing to medical charts and sympathetic looks.
She had told herself she could handle the lie if she named it clearly.
She had not accounted for this: for him changing shape in front of her, little by little, until she no longer knew which part was performance and which part was the man.
The car rolled into the private underground entrance of Taylor’s building. By the time they were in the elevator, Maya’s legs felt hollow. She leaned back slightly against the mirrored wall.
Taylor noticed instantly. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“That wasn’t a convincing yes.”
“I’m tired.”
The elevator rose in soundless motion. Reflected in the brass and mirror, they looked like a couple returning from a successful evening: elegant, expensive, well-matched by silhouette if not by truth. Maya almost laughed at the cruelty of it.
