“What do you mean, I wouldn’t be able to work? Too vulnerable how?”

“Oh, come on, Meg. It can’t have escaped your notice that someone is trying to kill you.”

“But that’s not—”

“No, we don’t know who it is or why. It may be you, it may be me. And in the years to come it probably will be me. You’re not stupid. You know not all of my business is legal and that it sometimes involves disagreements that can’t be settled with a friendly meeting. Sometimes problems have to be eliminated. Sometimes warnings have to be given. To have you out there, working a job that requires you to be alone with strangers, one that puts you in the public eye? Bad enough you do it now. If we’re married? Impossible.”

Her glass was empty, and she didn’t feel as if she’d managed to swallow a drop of it. “Why do I have to give up my job? Why can’t you give up yours?”

“What?”

“No, really. Why can’t you give up your job if it’s so dangerous? Why do I have to be the one who loses everything? I mean, if we’re really talking about this here, and not just as some kind of abstract concept. Why do I have to stop working, stop being human, stop being anything at all, and you give up nothing? Hell, Greyson, you don’t even have to quit dating, apparently, you could just get yourself a series of girlfriends on the side and—”

“Jesus, is that what you think? Do you really trust me that little?”

“It’s not a matter of not trusting you. I don’t even know what you want! You haven’t even said, this whole time, what you want. You’ve never said how you feel about me, where you want this to go. How am I supposed to even consider all of this when I don’t even know how you feel, you won’t even tell me?”

“What? You don’t know how I—for fuck’s sake, what do you think we’ve been doing for the last year? Do you even know me at all? Do you think I’ve just been playing with you this whole time? Do you have any idea how vulnerable being with you makes me, how dangerous it is for me—”

“Oh, sorry, I don’t mean to inconvenience you.”

“God damn it, that’s not what I mean and you fucking know it. Or shit, maybe you don’t. I thought you did. I thought we didn’t need some fucking words—which you’ve never said either, may I remind you—to know where we stood.” He shrugged and stared at his empty glass as though he’d never seen anything like it before. “I thought we meant more to each other than that, frankly.”

Shit. He had to go and say that, didn’t he? This time she couldn’t stop the tears; they rolled down her cheeks, almost faster than she could wipe them away. They were talking about marriage and children, they were saying all the things she’d hoped they’d say someday, had assumed they would say—he was right. She had known where she stood. She had thought the words weren’t important.

But this didn’t feel the way she’d thought it would. Didn’t feel like a beginning. It felt like the end.

Because it was. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t give up her humanity, her job, and her radio show to become a sequestered housewife. There was nothing in the world wrong with being a stay-at-home mother or stay-at-home wife; she’d always assumed that she’d give up work for a few years if—when—she had a baby, that she’d arrange her schedule to be home after school once her child reached that age. It was one of the benefits of doing her kind of work.

But she’d never planned to give up her career entirely, for good. Not for five years but forever. And she’d always assumed—damn it, she’d always assumed it because it was the way it was supposed to be—that it would be a decision she made, one they made together. Not an edict. Not a condition. But a choice.

“If you really loved me,” she managed finally, “you’d want to be with me anyway. You’d figure something else out. But the way you want it, I give up everything, and you get everything. You won’t give up your life, I have to give up mine. You won’t give up your work, I have to give up mine.”

“Be reasonable, Meg.” The pleading look on his face would have broken her heart if it hadn’t already been shattered. “I make seventy or eighty times what you make. You wouldn’t have to work. You could spend your days doing anything you wanted—”

“But what I want to do is work!” Fuck. For someone who was supposed to be good at resolving conflicts, she was not doing a great job. But then it was always so much harder when it wasn’t simply advice given to others; the path wasn’t so clear when you were walking on it yourself. “I worked hard to get where I am, Greyson, it’s important to me.”

“And my work is important to me. And far more lucrative.”

“I didn’t get a PhD so I could become your fucking concubine.”

He winced. “It wouldn’t be—forget it. You’ve obviously made up your mind. I’m a scumbag who wants to use you and lock you in a basement.”

“That’s what it feels like.” The words came out hoarse, forced through her aching throat. “Greyson, can’t you see, making me give up my job and everything—I don’t think I can do it.”

He poured himself another drink, glanced back at her glass. She nodded, and he took it and filled it. For a moment the only sound in the room was him draining his glass and filling it again.

“There is another option,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there is, if it’s what you want. You—”

“If you suggest I be your girlfriend on the side, I will slap you.”

“What the hell do you want, then, Meg? You don’t want to marry me because of everything you’ll have to give up. You don’t want me to marry somebody else because—I don’t know why. Do—”

“You don’t know why? You can’t even imagine why I might not want to be your other woman?”

“I told you yesterday, it’s not like that. An arranged marriage is only—”

“An arranged—oh.” The penny dropped then; she couldn’t figure out how or why it took so long, but it did. “Win’s daughter, right? Leora. That’s why she’s here, isn’t it?”

He sighed. “Yes. Yes, Win wants me to marry her.”

“And what did you tell him?”

She waited for his answer, waited through one of the longest and loudest conversational pauses she’d ever experienced in her life. She’d started to wonder again if this was simply a terrible nightmare, and he wasn’t speaking because she was about to wake up, when he said, “I told him I’d think about it.”

“You told him you’d—you’re thinking about it? You’re fucking thinking about it?”

“I was trying to put him off until I had a chance to talk to you, to really explain. I wanted you to go to Florence with me, remember, I thought we could—”

“No. I can’t fucking believe you would do that to me. Now Win thinks you’re considering making me your mistress? Who else knows that? Did you even think how that makes me look?”

“Did you even think how it makes me look, to have you refusing to do the ritual for me?”

“You never asked me to do it for you!”

“Fine.” In a flash he was across the room, hauling her to her feet by the shoulders and looming over her, his dark eyes flaring red, his body throwing off heat like a furnace. “I’m asking you now, Meg. Will you do it for me? Do the ritual and be with me. Give up your job and be with me. Marry me, damn it.”

His lips cut off any answer she could have made.