Chapter 3: Jessica - Forced Marriage to the CEO

Jessica

It’s Monday morning and I’ve been staring at the same spreadsheet for twenty minutes and the numbers still won’t hold still long enough to mean anything.

Q3 outcomes, final pass, due to the board by Friday. I know this data. I built this data, cell by cell, over four months of intake forms and follow-up calls and caseworkers who forget to log the wins as carefully as they log the crises. I should be able to close this out in an hour. Instead, I keep reading the same column and losing the thread of what I was checking it against, because somewhere underneath the numbers is a man’s voice asking me why I don’t inflate a report that would bring in more money if I did.

Especially then, I told him. Like it was obvious. Like I hadn’t spent the whole drive home replaying it over and over in my mind. Wondering if it sounded like conviction or like something closer to showing off.

I close the spreadsheet, open it again but write nothing.

One of my caseworker leads pops his head into my office at ten forty, which means it’s a bad one.

“It’s Swain,” he says. “The father. He’s saying he wants unsupervised again, and the ex found out and she’s not answering the door for the custody exchange. Everybody, including our on-site rep, is standing in a parking lot right now not knowing what to do. She called me and so I’m coming to you.”

“Where’s the court order?”

“Filed. He knows it’s filed. He’s saying the order’s wrong, that his lawyer’s fixing it. My on-site rep doesn’t think that’s true, but they don’t have anything in front of them that says it’s false.”

“Get me the order number. I’ll call the family court liaison directly, not the general line, and I’ll have something concrete for you in twenty minutes. Tell your rep to stay in the car. You call the mother and tell her to keep the door closed until you call her back or your rep walks to the door to give her instructions face-to-face. Tell her that’s not defiance, that’s exactly what the order allows her to do.”

“Copy.”

He’s already moving, and I like him for that. He doesn’t need to be told twice, and he doesn’t hover. I have the liaison’s direct line memorized. Unfortunately, that’s because I have to call that often which is depressing in retrospect. Nine minutes later I have a confirmation in writing that the original order stands, unmodified, and I forward it to my lead with one line: Have your rep show her this. She’s not the unreasonable one here.

It’s the first thing all morning that’s made sense.

* * *

Darnell stops by my office around noon with two coffees and that look in his eye he gets when he’s been mulling something in his head and can’t put it down even though I told him to.

“Hhhmmmm,” he says about nothing in particular. He sets one coffee in front of me and doesn’t sit down, which means this isn’t going to take long. “Heard you had an interesting night at the Belmont last Thursday.”

“It was a gala. They’re all interesting if you don’t mind a couple of hundred people all patting themselves on the back.”

“Word is you spent a while talking to Jonathan Atwell.”

Something in my chest lurches. I keep my eyes on the screen an extra second before I look up.

“We talked for a few minutes.”

“Uh-huh.” Darnell studies me over the rim of his own cup, and I know exactly what he’s doing, because I’ve watched him do it to donors twice his age and twice as evasive. “You know who that is, right? Beyond the biotech thing.”

“I know who he is.”

“Boston’s most eligible recluse. Usually only travels between his penthouse and the office. Doesn’t do interviews. Doesn’t do galas, usually, from what I hear, which makes it stranger that he was at that one.” He tips his head, trying to read my poker face and whether I’m showing a winning hand. “You want to tell me why you’ve been staring at that same spreadsheet since I got here?”

“I want you to go check on the Bradford compliance.”

“That an order or a deflection?”

“Both.”

He laughs, sits, and finally lets it go, so we can spend twenty minutes on actual work. We review vendor renewals, a grant deadline, and whether we can stretch the emergency fund through the end of the quarter without dipping into reserves we can’t afford to touch. By the time he leaves I’ve almost stopped thinking about the low, deliberate way Jonathan Atwell said my organization’s name and the fact that he almost seemed to know the inner workings as well as I do.

* * *

My father’s assistant doesn’t make me wait. She just smiles and says, “He’s expecting you,” which is the part that should have warned me.

The office doors open before I reach them. Floor-to-ceiling windows wrap the room, the city falling away in every direction. The Charles catches the late afternoon light, the harbor beyond it cold and silver and very far below. He’s standing near the glass when I walk in, two coffees already on the table beside his chair, set out like a peace offering before a word has been said.

Whatever this is, it has an agenda that’s to his advantage. It always does.

He turns as I enter, warm smile already in place.

“Jessica.” He crosses the room and kisses my cheek. “Good timing. I was hoping you’d come.”

I reply with a sardonic smile. “I wasn’t aware I’d been given a choice.”

His smile widens as he gestures for me to sit in the chair nearest to me.

“There’s the daughter I know.”

I don’t sit. “I have a board deck due tomorrow.”

“This won’t take long.” He settles into his chair, unhurried, already contradicting himself, and gestures again toward the other seat expecting me to take it. I sit because the alternative is standing in front of his desk like I’ve been called to the principal’s office, which is worse.

“I hear you made quite an impression Thursday night.”

“I had a conversation.”

“Jonathan Atwell doesn’t have conversations, Jessica. He conducts due diligence and calls it small talk.” He smiles, the warm one, the one that means he’s enjoying himself. “I want to talk to you about him.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Actually, there is, or will be.” He says it simply, like a weather report, and something cold moves through me before he’s finished the sentence. “He has a clause in his family trust that requires he be married and cohabiting before his contract signing anniversary. From what I am told it’s just bad luck for him that the due date happens to hit weeks before the AdComm hearing window. If he does not meet the clause, the company’s governance goes public in a way that would gut the stock overnight. Around six weeks until the clause lapses, twelve weeks to AdComm give or take. Probably a little less, now.”

I go still. “How and why would you know that?”

“Because I make it my business to know things that matter to me.” He leans back, entirely at ease.

I feel a cold dread settle under my ribs. My father doesn’t spend this kind of effort on anyone without an end game already in motion. My mind scrambles for dots I can’t yet see connecting. But they’re there, otherwise he wouldn’t be in this chair, with these coffees and that ridiculous grin on his face.

I keep my hands loose in my lap and my voice even. “And what does any of that have to do with me?”

“Of everyone in that room Thursday, you are the one candidate whose name won’t raise a single eyebrow.” He says it like he’s reading from a list he prepared earlier, which he probably did. “You are respectable, philanthropic and photogenic enough for the business pages. You are serious enough that nobody would mistake it for a publicity stunt. It’s a mutually beneficial situation. He solves a problem and you write your own ticket.”

“Let me understand this.” I hold his gaze. “You want me to marry a stranger?”

“If he asks, I want you to consider an arrangement that stabilizes his company and gains you entrance into inner circles that provide next-level funding.” He tilts his head. “This kind of association makes the Aldrich renewal stop being a question I have to keep answering for you.”

He says it like he’s doing me a favor. And the worst part is I think he has convinced himself it’s true, that everything he does is completely for me and Anchor Point. It’s funny how he thinks that he has never received a single benefit from his perceived philanthropic associations, never once paraded me around to make himself look like the charitable, doting father.

“What do you get out of this?”

He smiles, and it looks genuine, which is still the hardest part. “I get to see my daughter in a stable situation with a man I respect. Is that so difficult to believe?”

“Yes.”

He laughs, warm and easy, like I’ve said something charming. “You are so much like your mother.” Then he puts his hands out like he’s placating me. “Talk to him. That’s all I’m asking. Any arrangement would be temporary, the terms would be yours to negotiate, and you would have protections in place from the start. I’d make sure of it.”

Then he picks up his coffee. “The lease on the Roxbury office,” he adds, almost as an afterthought, “is up for renewal in a few months. I’d hate for anything to complicate that.”

And there it is. I take it for what it’s supposed to be. A not-so-subtle threat.

He puts his coffee down, stands unhurried, and buttons his jacket. “Think about it. Don’t take too long. These windows close faster than people expect.” His assistant is already holding the door open.

I walk out through the lobby and don’t stop until the cold November air hits my face on the street outside, and for the first time since I sat down in that office I feel like I can breathe.

I walk without deciding where I’m going. Past office workers balancing coffee cups, tourists studying maps, and a father kneeling to zip his little girl’s pink coat before they cross the street together.

My head is reeling with the idea that Jonathan Atwell might need a wife and that I could be a viable candidate.

My phone buzzes and I already know it isn’t Jonathan. The thought slips in so quietly I almost miss it.

Why am I disappointed? I met him once. One conversation, one man who asked questions instead of making assumptions, one man who listened. That’s all it should be because hope is a luxury I can’t afford to keep.

The last time I believed someone wanted me, I paid for it with pieces of myself I never quite got back. I won’t do that again. Not for Jonathan Atwell, not for anyone.

I can’t think about that now, so I start walking again. But as my mind starts to wander, I find myself turning over one thing my father said.

He has a clause in his family trust.

My father didn’t hear that from a donor or a headline. He heard it from somewhere close enough to Jonathan Atwell’s world that the information came to him fast, and clean, and complete. It’s the kind of information a man doesn’t stumble into. It’s the kind he goes looking for, to use. I don’t know yet what my father wants out of this beyond what he’s told me. I just know, standing here with the city moving around me, that what he told me is definitely not the whole of it.