The highlighters were Dani's idea.
"You're going into a negotiation," Dani had said last night, sitting cross-legged on their kitchen counter eating cereal at eleven p.m. like a person with nothing to lose. "You need to look like you know what you're doing."
"I do know what I'm doing."
"Then you need to look like you've done it before."
Wren had spent two hours on the amendments. Pink for non-negotiable. Yellow for preferred but flexible. Green for the ones she'd added mostly to have something to concede, because she'd watched enough legal dramas to know you never walk into a negotiation with only the things you actually want.
The result is a seven-page document that she's printed, collated, and paper-clipped with the methodical energy of someone who has been anxious since four in the morning.
She looks at it now in the elevator on the way up to the fourteenth floor of a building that is all glass and clean lines and the kind of architecture that makes you feel like your shoes aren't good enough. She's wearing her good blazer. The one she bought for her mother's hospital meetings, which is the same blazer she's worn to every serious occasion since because she only has the one serious-occasion blazer.
She looks fine.
She looks fine and she has seventeen amendments and she is absolutely not going to let a man whose office has a dedicated elevator intimidate her into agreeing to things that aren't on her list.
The elevator opens.
The assistant at the front desk looks at her with the polite, practiced expression of someone trained to be welcoming to everyone and visibly neutral about most of them.
"Wren Calloway," Wren says. "I have a nine o'clock."
His office is exactly what she expected and she resents how exactly it is.
Floor-to-ceiling windows. A desk that could comfortably seat four people. Bookshelves that look like they're arranged by someone who's actually read the books, which surprises her, which she doesn't let show. Everything in shades of charcoal and slate and the occasional deep green, like a forest that went corporate and made peace with it.
Beckett is standing at the window with a coffee cup, looking out at the city the way people look at things they own. He turns when she comes in.
The eyebrow moves. Just slightly. Up, and then deliberately back to neutral.
She's holding her color-coded document in one hand and her tote bag in the other and she is wearing her interview blazer, and something about the way he registers all of this — quickly, completely, without expression — makes her feel like she's been scanned.
"Ms. Calloway," he says.
"Wren," she says automatically.
"Wren." He sets down the coffee. "This is Marcus Hale, our legal counsel."
She hadn't noticed the other man — fifties, wire-rimmed glasses, the quietly exhausted look of someone who has spent decades cleaning up after other people's decisions. He's seated at the desk with his own folder open, a pen ready, the posture of a man who has attended many of these meetings and expected this one to be straightforward.
He looks at her document.
He looks at the highlighters.
Something in his expression changes in a way that he very professionally keeps from becoming a full reaction.
"I've made some amendments," Wren says, and slides a copy across the desk to each of them.
Beckett reads it the way he does everything, she's learning — completely still, no visible reaction, just those gray eyes moving down the page with the methodical focus of someone who actually retains what they read. Marcus, beside him, is making small pencil marks she can't decipher.
She sits across from them with her hands folded and she does not fidget.
She is fidgeting on the inside, catastrophically, but that's nobody's business.
"Separate bedrooms," Beckett says. Not a question.
"Non-negotiable." She taps the pink section. "You'll note the highlighting system."
His eyes come up to hers briefly. "I see the highlighting system."
"The pink ones are—"
"Non-negotiable. Yes. I can read color."
Marcus coughs. It might be a laugh. It's professionally indeterminate.
Beckett turns the page.
"You want to keep your Saturday shifts at the diner."
"Every Saturday. Both of them — morning and afternoon split. It's in section two."
"I can see that it's in section two."
"I'm just—"
"I can read," he says, and there's no heat in it, which somehow makes it funnier than if there were, and she has to look at the window for a moment and collect herself.
He reads. She waits. The office is quiet in the specific way of expensive rooms — soundproofed and still, cut off from the city below in a way that makes the city feel theoretical.
"No terms of endearment," he says.
"Unless in public. And mutually agreed upon in advance." She meets his eyes. "I don't need you calling me sweetheart in private. I don't need it at all, actually, but I understand there may be appearances to maintain."
Something shifts in his face. Imperceptible to anyone who hadn't been studying him across a diner table for forty-eight hours.
"Agreed," he says.
She keeps her expression neutral. That one she'd marked pink but she'd thought it might take ten minutes.
"No decisions made about your appearance without your consent," Marcus reads, in the tone of a man reading a document he has some personal feelings about. He looks at Beckett. Beckett looks at Wren.
"My father's events have a dress code," Beckett says.
"Then tell me the dress code. I'll dress accordingly." She keeps her voice even. "What I won't do is have someone make appointments on my behalf, or arrive somewhere to find a stylist waiting for me because someone decided my wardrobe needed management. I'm agreeing to a contract. I'm not agreeing to a makeover."
The word lands with a small, precise thud.
Beckett looks at her for a moment.
"Agreed," he says again.
Fourteen of the seventeen take forty-five minutes and it feels, weirdly, like a conversation rather than a confrontation — a back and forth with some friction and some give, like a door that sticks but opens. She hadn't expected that. She'd expected his lawyer to do most of the talking. She'd expected Beckett to be immovable in the particular way of people who've never had to be moved.
But he reads everything. He responds to everything. He disagrees with specificity rather than dismissal, which she hadn't accounted for and which quietly recalibrates something in her assessment of him.
Then they get to the last three.
Clause fourteen is about her photography.
She wants the right to document the year — privately, not for publication, not for any use connected to the Harlow name without explicit permission. Her own record of her own year. He says there are confidentiality implications. She says she's not trying to sell pictures of his hallways to a gossip column, she just wants to keep doing the thing she does. He says he needs to review what keep doing the thing she does looks like in practice. They go back and forth for eleven minutes. They end up with a modified clause that requires mutual review of any image before external use, which she'd have agreed to from the start if he'd just said that.
Clause fifteen costs her the most.
She'd written it in yellow — flexible — but she fights for it like it's pink. She wants the right to terminate the agreement with ninety days notice if the terms are materially breached. Beckett's position is that materially breached is too subjective. Her position is that she's not signing away a year of her life without an exit clause that doesn't require her to prove something to a man who drafted the contract. They argue about the definition of material breach for seventeen minutes. Marcus looks like he is mentally elsewhere, somewhere peaceful, with a good book.
They settle on a defined list of breach conditions. She writes them herself, by hand, on a yellow legal pad he passes her across the desk, while Beckett reads something on his phone. Marcus adds three items she hadn't considered and gives her a look, quick and small, that she thinks might be approving.
Clause seventeen, they table entirely. She'll review his proposed language and respond within forty-eight hours. It feels like a draw, which in her experience is almost the same as a win.
It's over in just under two hours.
Beckett is reviewing the final page — the one with the agreed amendments noted in Marcus's neat pencil marks — and the office has gone quiet again, that deep expensive quiet, and Wren is packing her color-coded document back into her tote bag with the specific exhausted satisfaction of someone who did a hard thing and didn't fold.
She hears him, almost to himself, low and not quite directed at her. "More thorough than my last three lawyers."
She should feel pleased.
She does, a little. The part of her that spent four hours on color-coded amendments and got fourteen of seventeen feels genuinely, warmly pleased.
But then she hears the door.
The meeting room adjacent to his office — she'd noticed it when she came in, the door sitting half an inch open, an oversight that nobody had corrected. She hears his phone buzz, hears him step toward it, hears him say, in a voice two degrees flatter than the one he's been using with her all morning:
"It's handled. We'll have what we need for the filing." A pause. "Don't worry."
She stills.
"She'll be gone in a year and none of this will matter. The company stays intact."
Gone.
Not done. Not the contract will conclude. Not even the cold-legal the arrangement will be dissolved.
Gone.
Like she was a weather event. A complication. Something to be waited out.
She sits with her tote bag in her lap and her color-coded document inside it and her seventeen amendments, fourteen agreed, and she thinks about the way he'd said more thorough than my last three lawyers like it was a compliment and like compliments were not something he spent carelessly.
She thinks about gone.
Marcus is saying something to her. She answers it correctly — she must, because he nods and starts gathering his papers. Beckett comes back through the door, phone in his pocket, face arranged back to the neutral architecture of his regular expression, and he looks at her the way he's looked at her all morning.
Like she's a necessary part of a plan that was already in motion before she arrived.
She picks up her tote bag. Stands.
"I'll have the clause seventeen language to you by Thursday," she says.
"Wednesday," he says. Because of course he does.
"Thursday," she says, and walks out the way she walked in — straight back, sensible shoes, the interview blazer doing its job.
She doesn't let the elevator door close before the feeling hits her, finally, somewhere between the fourteenth floor and the lobby.
Not quite anger. Sharper than hurt.
The precise, clarifying sting of someone who just found out the room they thought they were negotiating in wasn't actually the room where the decisions were being made.