Her face tightened, but she nodded.
“You’re right.”
She placed an envelope beside the contract.
It contained the entire remaining payment, plus enough to cover every part of my mother’s recovery.
“You earned it,” she said.
“I did not earn money for almost dying.”
“You earned it for staying when leaving would have been easier.”
“That is the problem, Regina.
You keep turning everything into something you can pay for.”
She lowered her eyes.
“I don’t know how to ask people to stay.”
“Start with the truth.”
So she told me all of it.
She told me she had chosen me because, months before the contract, she had watched me return a wallet containing thousands of dollars to a careless investor.
She told me she had memorized my mother’s surgery schedule before she offered the deal.
She admitted the gala kiss had terrified her because it was the first thing between us she could not control.
Then she said, “I love you, Matthew.
That is not a reason you owe me anything.”
I left that night.
Not to punish her.
I needed to know whether I missed Regina or merely the intensity of surviving beside her.
For three weeks, I slept on a chair beside my mother’s rehabilitation bed.
Regina never called to pressure me.
She sent no gifts.
She visited once, brought terrible vending-machine coffee, and let my mother beat her at cards.
When she left, my mother looked at me and said, “That woman loves you badly, but she is learning.”
On the morning our original contract reached twelve months, I returned to the house.
Regina sat alone at the kitchen counter.
Two cups of coffee waited between us, but she had not written my name on either one.
“The agreement expires today,” she said.
“I know.”
She slid annulment papers toward me.
No lawyer stood beside her.
No payment waited underneath.
Her hand shook openly, and she did not hide it.
“You are free,” she said.
I placed a single sheet of paper over the annulment documents.
I had written three lines.
No payments.
No secrets.
No pretending.
Regina read them twice.
“What happens if one of us breaks the agreement?” she asked.
“The other one gets to leave alive.”
A laugh escaped her, followed by tears.
I took the pen from the counter and signed my name.
She signed beneath it.
We remained legally married, but the transaction ended that morning.
Months later, Regina unlocked Julian’s room for the last time.
Evelyn helped us box the files that belonged with the case.
We gave Julian’s jacket and photographs to his mother, but Evelyn left one picture behind—the one where Julian and Regina were laughing.
“He should be remembered for more than how he died,” she said.
Regina placed the photograph in the hallway where sunlight could reach it.
My mother recovered.
I stopped driving Regina’s car and started managing the company’s community transportation program, with a real title that nobody could use as a joke.
Regina still worked too late.
