"Ethan Lucas asked, flat and calm: 'One million, pretend to be my girlfriend — half a year. Interested?'" Nina's first instinct was to laugh. Her second was to check the table for wine stains, then the ceiling for cameras. The Lucas garden smelled like clipped hedges and money; everything in Mariner Heights smelled like someone else’s success. She wasn't supposed to hear the rest. She was supposed to be the ornament: stand on the marble steps, smile when cameras fluttered, look fragile enough for Victoria to cradle. Instead she had been leaning against the hydrangea hedge, pretending to admire a silverbird statue while listening to the way a woman could flatten a room with a sentence. "You understand the optics," Victoria said, and her voice was bred to make people confess. "Board members like certainty. My son needs a partner who looks the part, keeps the dinners diplomatic, and does not—" she clipped the word like a shears— "complicate the narrative." Ethan's reply was not theatrical. It was businesslike and weary. "I can do that for six months. A year. I just—" He ran a hand through his hair the way someone does when he’s trying to be human under a suit. "I don't want to date, Mom. I want a buffer. A face. One million, and we're done." Victoria sniffed. "Half a year. Three hundred thousand up front. The rest when we can look confident." That was the angle. Public image as commodity