The contract was forty-seven pages.

Naia had been expecting something substantial, but forty-seven pages for a ninety-day arrangement still struck her as an amount of paper that was trying to tell her something. She printed it out at the copy shop down the street because she read contracts better on paper, and she had carried the resulting stack home in a folder and set it on the kitchen table, and then she had called Maro.

"Come down," she said. "And bring coffee if you have any made."

He arrived eight minutes later with two cups and the particular expression he wore when he was prepared to be either alarmed or fascinated depending on how the next twenty minutes went.

She set the contract on the table between them.

He looked at it. He picked it up. He put it back down.

"Forty-seven pages," he said.

"I counted."

"For ninety days."

"They are very thorough."

He picked up his coffee. "What does it say?"

She told him, summarizing from the notes she had already made on a separate pad. The arrangement was, at its documented core, a professional engagement: Naia would participate in a series of coordinated public appearances alongside Crown Prince Kael, the narrative of which would be managed by the palace Communications Office. She would be provided with briefings before each event, styling support when required, transportation and accommodation for any events that required overnight stays. She would have a designated palace liaison for questions and logistical needs.

She would not, under any circumstances, discuss the arrangement's professional nature with any third party. She would not, under any circumstances, deviate from the approved public narrative without prior clearance. She would not enter into any secondary media arrangements related to her participation without palace approval.

She would also receive, at the end of the ninety days, a sum that Maro responded to by setting down his coffee very carefully.

"That number," he said.

"Yes."

"That is a significant number."

"It covers the studio for two years," she said. "Almost exactly."

He was quiet for a moment, which was rare. Maro processed most things quickly and verbally. When he was quiet it usually meant he was deciding whether to say the obvious thing or wait for her to say it herself.

"What are you thinking?" she asked.

"I'm thinking," he said, "that you're sitting across from me with a red pen and that contract, which means you've already read it twice."

She looked at the red pen in her hand, which she had not realized she was holding. "I've read it once."

"Naia."

"And made some notes."

He looked at her over his coffee. "What does the sensible part of you think?"

She turned the contract to the page she had marked. Near the bottom of the fourth section, in language that was very precise and probably designed by multiple lawyers to be precisely that way: The party of the second part acknowledges that this arrangement is of a professional nature only, and that any representation to the contrary, whether in public or in private, shall constitute a breach of the terms herein.

She had underlined it.

She had underlined it twice.

"The sensible part thinks it's a job," she said. "A well-compensated, clearly defined, time-limited job with a very specific performance requirement."

"And the other part?"

She looked at the underlined sentence.

She thought about the meeting room in the palace, the two minutes before the PR team arrived. The question that had not been phrased as a question. The word yes, said simply and without elaboration, in response to something she had said about invisibility.

"The other part thinks," she said, "that it's going to be more complicated than forty-seven pages makes it look."

Maro set down his coffee again. "Tell me about him."

"The crown prince."

"You've met him. I want to know what you thought."

She considered this. She thought about how to be accurate rather than simply honest, because there was sometimes a difference between the two.

"He's not what I expected," she said finally. "He asked a real question first. Before any of the official parts of the meeting. He wanted to know who I had drawn the character from, and he asked it like the answer actually mattered to him."

"Did it?"

"I don't know. He's very controlled. It's hard to read what actually matters to him versus what he's choosing to present."

Maro was quiet again, looking at her in the way he looked at his more interesting photographs before deciding how to print them.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing." He picked up his coffee. "Just noting that you've described him in more detail in thirty seconds than you describe most people you've known for months."

She did not have a good response to that, so she turned back to the contract.

She read it for another two hours after Maro left, working through every clause with the methodical attention she applied to complicated briefs. She made notes. She flagged two sections she wanted to ask about. She read the compensation terms three times, not because she did not understand them but because she wanted to be certain she did.

At one point she stopped and called her mother.

Her mother was in another city, two hours away, where she had built a second life that was warm and full and genuinely good, which Naia was glad for and also found, in an unexamined way she preferred not to examine, slightly untethering. They talked regularly. They were close in the way of people who had navigated something difficult together and come out with a relationship that was built on what remained rather than what had been lost.

"I have a job opportunity," Naia said. "A strange one. I wanted to ask what you think."

She did not tell her mother the specifics. She said it was a high-profile client engagement, very well compensated, involving a public-facing element she was not used to. She said there were aspects of it that felt like they required more from her than she usually gave to professional arrangements.

Her mother listened.

Then she said: "What's making you hesitate?"

"I don't know yet. That's what worries me."

"You've been hesitating before you know the reason for as long as I can remember," her mother said. "You used to do it with friendships too. You'd like someone and then find a reason to keep your distance before they could do it first."

"I'm aware of that," Naia said.

"I'm not saying don't hesitate. I'm saying make sure you know which kind of hesitation it is. There's the kind that tells you something is genuinely wrong, and there's the kind that's just you protecting yourself from something that might matter."

After she hung up, she sat at the kitchen table with the contract and the quiet apartment around her and the specific quality of silence that came with two in the morning.

She thought about the fence she had always kept, the one she maintained not because she was unfriendly but because she had learned, very specifically, that people moved on. Her father had not chosen to. But the fact that the leaving was not chosen did not make the absence any smaller. And her mother had not moved on in a way that was unkind, but she had moved on in a way that created a particular distance, and Naia had absorbed that lesson the way you absorb things at seventeen: completely and without realizing it.

She was good at keeping people at an arm's length that felt close enough not to notice.

She was good at being present without being arrived.

She looked at the contract. At the underlined sentence. The party of the second part acknowledges this arrangement is of a professional nature only.

It was a job, she told herself. A well-defined, time-limited, extremely well-compensated job with clear parameters and a visible end date.

Ninety days. Then back to normal.

She picked up her pen.

She signed on the indicated line, initials on the pages that required initials, full signature where it said full signature.

She looked at her name on the last page. Her handwriting was small and careful, the letters consistently sized, not taking up more room than they needed. She had never been able to do the signatures that occupied the whole line, the ones that announced themselves.

She put the contract back in the folder.

She looked at the time. Two forty-seven in the morning. Her tea had gone cold on the windowsill where she had left it. The city outside was in the low-frequency mode it reached in the middle of the night, quiet but not silent, still breathing.

She reached into her bag, which was on the chair beside her, and took out the book. Her copy, the one she carried with her. She set it on the table, cover up: the prince at the window, the city below.

She had been drawing lonely princes since she was nineteen, she thought. Long before this book. Long before anyone was looking. She had been drawing the specific shape of a certain kind of distance, the kind that lived inside a person rather than between them and other people, and she had done it because it was the only way she knew to look at it without it being a problem.

She wondered if that was what he had recognized.

The feeling of being visible to no one, in a room full of people who were all watching you.

She set the book back in her bag.

She sent the signed contract to Director Sae's email with a short, professional cover note.

Then she washed her cold tea out of the mug, filled it with water instead, and sat back down at the kitchen table and opened her sketchbook to the drawing she had started on the train: the formal room, two chairs, the partial figure.

Her hand moved without asking permission. She drew the window. The city beyond it. The quality of light that fell across a table where two people sat with a folder between them.

She stopped before she had drawn the second figure.

She closed the sketchbook.

She went to bed, which was the sensible thing to do.

In the morning there was a reply from Director Sae: confirmation received, contract accepted, first briefing scheduled for Monday at nine, a separate note about logistics and what to expect.

And at the bottom, a single line that was not from Director Sae: This will be easier than the contract makes it look. I expect you have questions. You can direct them to me directly if you prefer.

No signature. But she knew who it was from.

She read the line twice. She was not sure if it was meant to be reassuring. She was not sure if she found it reassuring or if she found it, instead, the kind of thing that made the complicated feeling she had been trying to identify slightly more complicated.

She put the phone face-down on her kitchen table.

She looked at her book.

She thought: ninety days.

She thought: back to normal after.

She thought: and this is why I keep the pen.

She turned the phone back over and typed a reply: Thank you. I have several questions. I'll bring them Monday.

She pressed send before she could reconsider the phrasing, which was either bold or insufficient, and she had a feeling, looking at it in her sent folder, that she was not yet equipped to tell the difference.

Three days after she signed the contract and sent it back, Naia sat in her studio in the early morning and tried to understand what she had agreed to.

Not the legal terms. She understood those. Forty-seven pages of carefully constructed language had made the legal terms available to her in significant detail. What she was trying to understand was the thing underneath the language, the thing that the language was describing from the outside without being able to fully contain: the actual shape of the next ninety days.

She had done complicated things before. Her life had required a reasonable number of complicated things, and she had managed them through the application of what her father, when she was very young, had called the pencil principle: when you don't know what something is, draw it. Not perfectly. Not correctly. Just commit a line to paper and see what the line tells you, because a committed line is always more information than a blank page.

She applied the pencil principle now, in the literal way, opening her sketchbook and drawing what she knew.

She drew a figure, which was herself. She drew a second figure, which was him. She drew the space between them, which was the specific distance of a professional arrangement with defined terms and an end date. She drew the cameras, which were the thing that made the professional arrangement visible to other people and therefore real in a social sense even if it was not real in the private sense. She drew the ninety days as a line running across the bottom of the page, with a mark at the end of it.

She looked at what she had drawn.

It was accurate, she thought. It was accurate and it was incomplete, in the way that all maps were incomplete, because maps described the terrain without accounting for the weather or the light or the particular quality of a day in a place that made the same terrain feel entirely different from one visit to the next.

She turned the page and drew something else. She drew the room she had been in on Thursday. The table, the chairs, the painting on the wall. The space as it had been before the PR team arrived, when it had contained two people and a question and a word that was one syllable and had carried more weight than she had expected.

She drew the chair across the table.

She sat with the drawing for a while.

The thing about the arrangement that she had not fully accounted for, that the contract's forty-seven pages had described very thoroughly and yet not addressed at all, was this: she was going to have to be near him. Not in a general sense, but in the specific physical sense of existing in the same space, performing adjacency, learning the texture of someone's presence in the way you learned it when you spent time in rooms with them. And she knew, from sufficient experience of herself, that she was not very good at remaining unmoved by presence. She was better at distance. She had carefully maintained very good distance from most people for most of her adult life, and she had gotten very good at making the distance look like something else: independence, focus, artistic temperament.

The distance was real. The other descriptions were also real. They were not in conflict.

But the arrangement, as contracted, was going to make the distance harder to maintain. And she was not sure yet what that meant or what she was going to do about it.

She made a second cup of tea.

She thought about the money, which was the simplest and most concrete part of the situation and therefore the most useful thing to think about when she needed to think clearly. The money was real and sufficient and would resolve a specific set of pressures that had been applying themselves to her life with increasing frequency. The money was not why she had signed the contract before two in the morning, or not entirely, but it was a reason that could be looked at directly without requiring the kind of careful lateral vision she was applying to the other reasons.

She thought about the word yes.

She thought about the line at the bottom of the email: This will be easier than the contract makes it look.

She thought about what that meant. About whether easier was a promise or an observation or something else, the specific thing you said when you had thought about something from multiple angles and believed the outcome was manageable while remaining unable to guarantee it.

She thought she probably would not know which it was until she was in the middle of the ninety days and could look back at the beginning with the particular clarity that the middle of things sometimes provided.

She opened her email again and looked at her sent message to Ms. Pael, the short professional note confirming the contract. She read her own words: looking forward to the arrangement. The words were fine. They were accurate in the way of words that were chosen for their professional function.

She thought about what she would write if she were writing to the person rather than the office.

She did not write that version. She closed the email.

She picked up her sketchbook and added one more line to the drawing of the room: a window, set in the wall on the left, looking out onto something she did not draw, because she did not know yet what was outside that particular window, and she preferred not to draw what she had not seen.

She would find out.

In ninety days she would know exactly what the view from that window looked like, and whether it was the kind of view you found yourself drawn back to or the kind you oriented away from after a while. She would know many things she did not currently know. She had always found that the approach of certain kinds of knowledge required a specific patience, not passive but active, the patience of someone who was paying attention rather than waiting.

She was paying attention.

She closed the sketchbook, capped her pen, finished her tea.

She turned back to the drafting table and the webtoon cover and the clear and manageable deadline, and she worked until the morning had properly arrived, at which point she washed her hands and her face, noted the ink that remained on her left knuckle, and began the entirely separate and more tractable task of getting ready for the day.