A woman paid me to marry her on paper so her dying grandmother would leave her the family fortune. My father was sick, and I was running out of ways to save him, so I said yes. I told myself it was just a role. Then her grandmother died, the will was read, and I was left with something that shook me.
Let me tell you the kind of man I was before any of this happened.
I was the guy rehearsing Shakespeare monologues in a diner bathroom between shifts, smelling like coffee and fryer grease. The guy driving forty minutes for unpaid community theater because the stage was the only place he still felt like himself. The guy sitting beside his father’s hospital bed twice a week, watching the bills pile up and promising everything would be fine.
A decent man in an impossible situation. That’s exactly how Claire found me.
***
She came into the diner on a Wednesday, sat in my section, and ordered black coffee she barely touched. She watched me work for about twenty minutes before she said anything, and I figured she was going to complain about something.
Instead, she slid a business card across the table and said, “I need a husband.”
I laughed. She didn’t.
“Sit down for five minutes,” she said. “Please.”
She explained. Her grandmother, Mrs. Rosemund, was dying and had written a condition into her will years ago: Claire had to be married to inherit.
Claire was 32, single, and had apparently never taken that clause seriously until she was staring down the reality of losing a very large fortune.
“How large?” I asked.
She told me.
I kept my face neutral and pressed my thumbnail into my palm under the table.
“I’ll pay you $1,000 a week,” she offered. “We stage a courtship, a wedding, spend a few months playing the happy couple. Once the inheritance clears, we divorce quietly and go our separate ways. Nobody gets hurt.”
“Mrs. Rosemund gets hurt,” I said.
Claire looked at me like I’d said something naive. “She’s dying, Tyler. She wants to die happy. We’d be doing her a favor with your acting skills.”
I should’ve walked away right then. I know that.
Then I went home that night and found three new hospital bills in the mailbox.
I called Claire the next morning.
We built our story the way you’d build a character for a play. Two weekends rehearsing how we met, how I proposed, the small details couples carry without thinking.
What happened next changed everything… continues on the next page.
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