Chapter 3: Breach
Here is what the Gazette got right: the contract was real. Page four was real. Clause Nine was real, typed in Alfred's beautiful old-fashioned font, and so was your handwriting in the margin, those neat block capitals, Party A will come back, which some columnist in the Sunday edition called "a chilling glimpse into the transactional heart of Gotham's elite."
Here is what the Gazette got wrong: everything else.
But nobody asks the florist.
Lucius Fox arrived at the manor at seven in the morning in a bow tie and a camel coat, carrying three phones, and took over the breakfast room like a general.
"Kessler's called an emergency session for Thursday," he said, not sitting. "He's going to argue that a man who hires a fiancée to fool his own board is, and I'm quoting the email he sent at four this morning to every shareholder with more than half a percent, 'constitutionally incapable of honest stewardship.'" He set one of the phones down. "It's a good line. I'd vote for it."
"Lucius," said Bruce.
"I'm just saying. He's had help with his prose." Lucius looked at you over his glasses, not unkindly. "How did they get it?"
You'd been asking yourself that since five fifteen. Bruce's copy was in a safe somewhere in this house that you suspected required a retinal scan and possibly a blood sample. Your copy had been at the shop. In the bottom drawer of your desk, in the back office, under the invoices, because you'd wanted to look at it sometimes, late, and remind yourself what this was.
"Trent," you said.
Bruce looked up.
"My old partner. He still had keys to the shop. I never changed the lock. I couldn't afford to." You heard your own voice from far away. "Kessler said four hundred thousand last night. He knew the number. He knew to the dollar. I thought he'd just looked up the loans, but he must have found Trent. And Trent would sell his own mother if you gave him a good enough table at a steakhouse."
Silence in the breakfast room. Alfred, at the sideboard, set down the coffee pot with great care.
"I'm sorry," you said. "This is my fault."
"It is not," Bruce said.
"I left it in a drawer, Bruce. A drawer. In a shop I couldn't afford to lock."
"Then it's my fault for putting you in a position where a drawer was enough." His voice was very quiet and very hard. Under the hardness, something else. "Lucius. Give us the room."
Lucius gave you the room. He took two of the phones with him and left the third, which began immediately to ring, and which Bruce turned face down without looking at it.
"The Thursday meeting," you said, before he could speak. "If you walk in there engaged to me, they'll eat you alive. You know they will. The contract is the whole story now. Nobody's going to believe anything else." You twisted the ring on your finger. It came off more easily than it had gone on. You set it on the white tablecloth between the toast rack and the marmalade, where it sat glowing in the cold morning light, absurdly small. "So you dissolve it. Breach, immediate dissolution, just like it says. You tell the board it was a stupid publicity stunt and you're very embarrassed, and you go back to being the guy who drives into fountains, and they forgive the fountain guy because they always do."
"And you?"
"I go back to my shop."
"With four hundred thousand dollars of debt."
"With a good story to tell at parties."
He was looking at the ring. He didn't touch it. He looked at it the way he'd looked at it the first night, in its old red box on his desk, like it was something that could go off.
"Nine A," he said.
"What?"
"You wrote it. Party B will not ask where Party A goes at night. Party A will come back." He lifted his eyes to you. "You never asked. Not once. Three months. Even last night."
"It was in the contract."
"It was in the contract," he agreed. "Clause Nine was in the contract too."
Then he got up and walked out of the breakfast room, and you sat there alone with the ring and the marmalade and the phone buzzing face down on the tablecloth like a trapped insect, and after a while you understood that you were waiting for him to come back, and that he wasn't going to. Not this morning.
You left the ring where it was. You took a cab back to Old Gotham.
The lock on the back door of Hollis & Vine hadn't been forced. You stood in the alley at three in the afternoon and looked at it and felt so stupid you could have cried. Inside, your desk drawer was open. The invoices were on the floor. Trent had always been messy.
You didn't call the police. You swept the floor. You opened the shop, because it was a Tuesday, and people kept coming in to buy single roses so they could look at you, the Sham Fiancée, the girl from page four, and you sold them their roses and smiled your hostage smile and thought about ranunculus until it stopped working.
You closed at eight. You didn't go upstairs to bed. You sat in the back with the cooler humming and the radio on low and the lights off, among the buckets, and you did what you'd been doing since you were twenty-two when the world got too loud, which was make arrangements nobody had ordered. Hellebores. Eucalyptus. Black calla lilies left over from the Botanical Society. Something with too many sharp edges in it.
At four in the morning, someone knocked on the back door.
You knew the knock. You didn't know how you knew it; he'd never knocked on a door in front of you in his life. Doors just opened for Bruce Wayne. But it was two knocks, careful, the second one quieter, like someone asking permission, and you put down the shears.
He was standing in the alley in the rain in a long dark coat. No umbrella. His hair was soaked flat. There was a new cut, small, at the corner of his mouth, and he was holding a bunch of flowers wrapped in newspaper so badly that half the stems were bent.
"These are ranunculus," Bruce said.
You looked at them. "Those are buttercups."
"The man at the all-night market said they were ranunculus."
"They're the same family. Technically. Ranunculus is a buttercup that went to finishing school." You couldn't stop looking at them. "Where on earth did you find buttercups in February?"
"I asked for them," he said, "very sternly."
You started to laugh, and it came out wrong, wet, and you put your hand over your mouth. He stood in the rain and let you, and didn't come in, and didn't push the flowers at you, just held them out in their ruined newspaper and waited.
"I found Trent," he said.
You stopped laughing.
"He's fine. Mostly. He's with Sergeant Bullock of the GCPD at the moment, giving a very detailed statement about a bank transfer from an offshore account that belongs to a shell company that belongs to a holding company whose registered agent is Gerald Kessler's brother-in-law." He said it the way other men read a grocery list. "Fifty thousand dollars for a photocopy of page four. Lucius has the paperwork. He'll present it Thursday. I don't think Gerald will be on the board by Friday."
"How did you find him?"
His jaw moved. "I asked very sternly."
You looked at the cut at the corner of his mouth. At his scraped knuckles holding the buttercups. You thought of the light in the clouds over the conservatory, and Clause Nine A, and every morning for three months that he'd walked carefully into the breakfast room and eaten nothing and read the obituaries all the way through with a pen.
You didn't ask. You stepped back from the doorway, and he came in out of the rain.
He stood dripping among your buckets of eucalyptus and your sharp black lilies, and he looked around the dark shop like a man walking into a church.
"I'm going to walk into that board meeting on Thursday," he said, "and tell them the truth."
"Bruce, they'll—"
"I'm going to tell them it started as a contract. Because it did." He set the buttercups down on your worktable very gently, as if they were the real thing. "And then I'm going to tell them that I breached it. Clause Nine. Comprehensively. In the greenhouse, around the second week of January, when you told a lemon tree to stop being dramatic."
You couldn't speak.
"I don't care if they believe me," he said. "I care if you do."
He reached into his coat and took out the old red leather box. He didn't open it. He just held it in his palm the way he'd held it across the desk in December.
"This was never a prop," he said quietly. "Alfred knew. I think I knew. I put Clause Nine in the contract because I thought if I wrote it down, it would hold. Nothing I write down ever holds." He swallowed. "I'm asking you to tear it up."
There was a pair of shears on the worktable. Your hands were shaking too badly to use them, so you took the contract out of the back pocket of your jeans, where you'd been carrying the Gazette's photograph of page four folded small for nineteen hours, and you tore it down the middle, and down the middle again, and let the pieces fall into a bucket of hellebores.
Then you went to him.
He kissed you like a man who'd been waiting all season to stop pretending. His hands came up to your face, careful, rough, cold from the rain; your hands were fisted in the wet front of his coat. He was so much bigger than you that he had to bend, and he did, completely, and you felt the moment he let go of every one of his prepared vocabularies and just held on. He tasted like rain. Somewhere behind you the cooler hummed and a bucket tipped over and neither of you cared.
When you broke apart, he kept his forehead against yours.
"I want to renegotiate," you said, breathless. "Nine A."
He went still. You felt it, the instinct in him to close the door, to keep it shut, to be the fountain guy forever.
"I want to know where you go," you said. "I'm not asking you to stop. I'd never ask you to stop. I just don't want to wait up in the dark anymore pretending to read fluid mechanics."
For a long moment, Bruce Wayne said nothing at all. Then he took your hand, and turned it over, and put the old red box in your palm, and closed your fingers around it.
"Come home," he said. "I'll show you."
The study at Wayne Manor was dark except for the fire. Alfred was waiting in it, fully dressed at five in the morning, as if he'd known. Maybe he had. He looked at your hand, at the ring that was back on it, and he made a small sound, and turned away for a moment to adjust something on the mantel that did not need adjusting.
Bruce led you to the grandfather clock in the corner. It was old, tall, walnut, and it had always been stopped. You'd noticed that your first week. Every clock in the house kept perfect time except this one.
He opened the glass face. He reached in, and very deliberately, he moved the hands.
Ten forty-seven.
There was a heavy click somewhere in the wall. The whole clock swung outward on hidden hinges, and cold air breathed up out of the dark behind it, smelling of stone and water and machine oil, and from somewhere far below, echoing, came a sound like a thousand pairs of wings.
Bruce held out his hand.
"Watch your step," he said. "It's a long way down."