Chapter 3: Easier

"You're late."

"Traffic."

"Try again."

Isla didn’t answer immediately. She shut the door behind her, leaned against it for half a second too long, then pushed off like it hadn’t happened.

"You're late," Eliza repeated from the kitchen.

"Am I being interrogated or fed?" Isla asked, walking in.

"Both. Sit down."

"You made your famous jollof."

"I made dinner." Eliza pulled out a chair. "Sit. Talk. Go."

Isla served herself, sat, picked up a fork.

"I signed," she said.

"Obviously." Eliza settled across from her, elbows on the table, chin in one hand. "And?"

"And nothing. I signed, put the pen down, stood up, left."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

Eliza stared at her. "He didn't say anything? You didn't say anything? There wasn't even a—" She made a vague gesture with the spoon that seemed to cover the entire concept of dramatic confrontation.

"He reminded me I still have to report to work Monday." Isla took a bite. "Apparently it was in the original employment contract. The divorce doesn't dissolve it."

Eliza blinked. "He said that just like that?"

Isla didn’t look up from her plate.

"Not exactly."

"How then?"

She didn't answer immediately.

"Like he already knew I wouldn’t like it."

Silence. Eliza set the spoon down. Slowly. Deliberately.

"He divorces you," she said, "and then tells you that you still have to work for him."

"Correct."

"That man." Her voice dropped an entire register. "That cold, calculated, who does that? Who does that? You gave him two years, Iz. Two years and he just..." She gestured broadly at the concept of Darian Blackwell. "And now he wants you back at his desk Monday like you're just an asset he gets to keep."

Did you at least react?" Eliza demanded. "Tell me you didn’t just stand there and take it."

Isla raised a brow. "What would you have preferred? Tears? A scene?"

"Yes!" Eliza snapped. "Something human!"

A pause.

Then softer, "Something that showed he doesn’t get to do that to you."

"Liz..."

"I'm not finished..."

"Liz." Isla looked at her. Just looked, steady, unhurried.

Eliza stopped.

Her eyes were bright with the specific fury that only family produced on your behalf. The kind that asked nothing in return because it came from somewhere older than that.

"Don't be angry," Isla said quietly.

Eliza blinked. "Excuse me?"

"If anything—" Isla turned her fork slowly between her fingers. "It makes things easier."

A different kind of quiet settled over the kitchen.

Eliza leaned forward. "Easier." She said it the way she said words she didn't trust yet, carefully, like she was checking underneath it. "Easier how, Isla."

Isla tapped her fork once against the plate.

“Access,” she said simply.

Eliza stilled.

“Access to what?”

Isla finally looked up.

“Everything.”

Isla looked at her rice.

Smiled.

"Eat your food, Liz."

"Isla Mercer..."

"The jollof is really good tonight."

"Don't you dare change the subject." Eliza pointed the spoon with the precision of someone who had been pointing it at Isla for maybe ten years. "What do you mean easier? What are you planning? Why do you have that face?"

"What face?"

"That face." Eliza narrowed her eyes. "The face you had when you were seventeen and told me everything was completely fine right before everything was absolutely not fine." She leaned in. "The face that means something is already in motion and you're just waiting for the rest of us to catch up."

Isla said nothing.

Which, with Isla, had always been its own kind of answer.

Eliza sat back slowly. The heat left her voice and something quieter took its place. Older.

"Whatever you're thinking." She looked at Isla steadily. "Just be careful. He has a lot of power, Iz. And you're going to be right in the middle of it. Every day." A pause. "Alone."

"I know exactly where I'm going to be," Isla said.

Eliza held her gaze for a long moment.

"That's what worries me," she said.

Isla reached across the table and squeezed her cousin's hand once. Brief. Firm. The pressure that meant I hear you and I've already decided at the same time without making either one a lie.

Eliza squeezed back. Didn't push further.

They had always known when the other one's mind was made up. Arguing past it was just noise.

They ate.

The conversation drifted, Eliza's week, something frustrating at her job that required increasingly dramatic hand gestures to explain properly, a jacket she'd seen in a shop window that she couldn't justify but was absolutely going to buy. Isla laughed in the right places. Offered opinions on the jacket. Let the evening settle around her like something warm and familiar.

This, she thought. This was the thing Darian's world had never once given her.

Eliza studied her again.

Then—

“Nate walked you out, right?”

Isla paused slightly.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And what?”

Eliza shrugged. “Nothing. Just asking.”

A beat.

“He’s… a good person,” Isla said.

Eliza hummed.

"People usually say that when they’re trying to convince themselves.”

Isla didn’t respond. She was scraping the last of her plate when her phone buzzed on the table.

She glanced down.

One notification. A calendar reminder she had set herself weeks ago, for exactly this date, this evening, this specific moment after everything was done.

One word.

Begin.

Her thumb hovered over the screen for a second.

Not hesitation.

Just… timing.

Then she locked it.

Set it down.

“Who’s that?” Eliza asked.

“Nobody.”

A lie.

Clean. Easy.

Practiced.

Isla picked up her fork again, like nothing had shifted.

But something had.

Quietly.

Irreversibly.

Monday wasn’t a return.

It was an entry point.