The pen feels wrong in my hand. Too heavy for what I'm about to do. I sign my name on the last page anyway — *Winona Crane* — in the careful cursive my mother spent two summers teaching me, the kind of handwriting that looks like I have my life together. I don't. I own a flower shop that is forty-three days behind on rent and a refrigeration unit that hums like it's dying, which it is. This contract — one month pretending to be some billionaire's girlfriend for a fee that would save everything — is the only option I have left that isn't bankruptcy. I set the pen down and finally look up at the man across the desk. The air goes out of me so quietly that he doesn't notice. He's taller than I remember, and the years have sharpened him the way cold weather sharpens a blade. Dark hair, cut close at the sides. A jaw that looks like it was drawn by someone who wanted to make a point. He wears a charcoal suit that probably costs more than three months of my rent, and he holds himself with the specific stillness of a man who has never once been told no and believed it. His eyes are gray — that particular gray I spent a year trying to forget — and they're moving over the contract pages with zero interest in me as a person. Milo Loring. I knew his name when I accepted this meeting. I did not know it would be *him.* "Everything in order?" he asks. His voice is the same too. Lower than I remembered, but the same. "Yes," I say. My own voice comes out steady. I am genuinely surprised. He doesn't look up. He's already reviewing his own copy, turning pages with one hand. His other hand rests on the desk beside a silver-framed photograph, small enough that I almost missed it — and then I don't miss it at all. A beach. White sand, pale winter light, a stretch of coast I would recognize from a thousand miles away. The exact cove where we spent a weekend five years ago, the last good weekend of my life before he disappeared without a word and I spent six months wondering what I did wrong. I stare at the photo until my vision sharpens too hard at the edges. He closes his copy of the contract and looks at me for the first time. Directly. Searching for nothing in particular. His expression is polite, professional, and completely empty of recognition. He has no idea who I am. I smile back like a stranger. ---