He looked at her. He thought: I should say something that makes me feel less like I've just been professionally dismantled in my own living room.

He didn't say anything. He opened the door for her.

She left.

He stood in the doorway and watched the elevator doors close behind her.

His lawyers came the next morning. There were three of them: Marcus Webb, who handled everything for his personal life; a family law specialist named Howard that Webb had pulled in; and an associate who sat in the corner and took notes. They read the documents for forty-five minutes while Ethan drank his second coffee and looked at the skyline.

"They're solid," Webb said finally.

"That's what you lead with?"

"She's had good work done. This isn't some template she downloaded. The inheritance waiver is airtight, the child support structure is indexed correctly, the divorce timeline is-" Webb paused. "It's reasonable. Honestly? If you were going to structure something like this yourself, I'd structure it similarly."

"She's twenty," Ethan said.

"She's twenty with a good lawyer."

Ethan set down his coffee. "What are my options?"

"In terms of legal exposure?" Webb looked at his colleague, then back. "We can confirm paternity and pursue a standard custody arrangement outside of marriage. We can contest paternity pending testing. We can-"

"I'm not contesting paternity."

Webb nodded. He hadn't expected otherwise. "Then outside marriage, you're looking at standard custody law. That gets complicated. Courts in New York tend to favor arrangements that involve both parents' participation, which means even if you want a clean break, you might end up-"

"More entangled," Ethan finished.

"More entangled. Whereas this arrangement-" Webb tapped the folder, "-has a defined endpoint. Ten months. Clean exit. The waiver means no future claims from the child against the estate beyond the monthly support."

Ethan stood up and went to the window. He thought about what Marcus wasn't saying, which was the thing Marcus would never say aloud in a room with an associate present, which was that the Harrington family was six weeks from the most significant Senate candidate endorsement in New York state history, and that his grandfather's name was attached to that endorsement in a way that made any paternity story - even a manageable one - an unnecessary complication.

Serena hadn't threatened him with that. He'd run the conversation back three times since last night and he was certain: she hadn't threatened him. She'd mentioned it the way she mentioned everything - as a fact, slightly aside, while they were discussing something else. She'd said, I've noticed the Harrington family has some significant political commitments coming up, and I'd imagine this isn't an ideal time for complicated press. That was all she'd said. Then she'd moved on.

It had landed like a threat anyway. He suspected she'd known it would.

He turned around. "Send her a counterproposal. Six months instead of ten. Lower monthly support figure."

Webb nodded and wrote something down.

Two hours later, Serena's lawyer responded to the counterproposal.

Ten months, non-negotiable. The support figure was non-negotiable. The timeline was based on gestation, not preference, and she had included a one-page attachment explaining, in plain language, exactly why ten months was the medically accurate window for the child to be born within the marriage before the divorce finalized. The attachment cited two sources.

Ethan read it twice. He thought: She attached citations.

He called Webb. "Accept the terms," he said.

"All of them?"

"All of them."

He hung up and drove home the long way, through the park, which he had never done before without a reason. He had a reason tonight. He needed the extra ten minutes to think without the building in front of him.

He thought about what he'd just agreed to. Ten months of legal marriage. A child. A woman with citations in a manila folder who had taken the subway to tell him she was pregnant and then taken the subway home. He thought about the way she'd said it: I'm trying to be efficient. I thought you'd prefer that. She'd been right. He had preferred it. He'd been dreading some version of this conversation since the morning after the party - since he'd woken at seven to a clean apartment and the kind of silence that told you a person had left with care rather than haste - and what he'd gotten instead was a folder and a timeline and no interest in his feelings about any of it.

He parked in the building garage and sat in the driver's seat for a moment. Four days until the ceremony. He'd told Marcus. He'd told no one else. His parents would need to know - it was connected to the endorsement situation and there was no version of the next ten months where Robert Harrington didn't find out - but he'd decided, without examining the decision too carefully, that he would handle that after. After the paperwork was done. After the window for reconsideration had closed.

He thought about what she'd said about her grandfather. The way she'd started the sentence and then stopped it, like a car hitting a speed bump mid-lane. He'd seen the seam. He would be very hurt. Not angry. And then she'd reassembled herself, neatly, and moved on to discuss the support structure.

He sat in the concrete quiet of the parking garage and thought about a woman on a rooftop who'd been watching the city the way someone assigned to study something watches it. He thought about how she'd looked at him when he walked over - interested, but not performing interest. Like he was worth examining.

He'd been curious about her. He'd made the mistake of following the curiosity.