The NDA is forty-seven pages long, which Sora thinks is probably not a coincidence but is certainly a coincidence, and she reads all of it twice before she picks up a pen.
She reads it at her desk the evening before the signing, with the lamp on and the city doing its usual things outside the window, and she reads it the way she reads everything that matters: starting from the back, where the definitions and the exclusions live, then from the front, then once more from any page that made her pause. The language is dense in the way that legal language is designed to be dense, meaning it is precise but resistant to being understood quickly, and she is not in a hurry.
The provision about her professional work is in section fourteen, subsection three, added in language that does not match the stylistic register of the surrounding paragraphs. Someone added it after the original draft was written. Someone who knew enough about her working situation to know it needed to be in there.
She reads it three times. She puts the NDA face-down on the corner of the desk where the children's book manuscript used to be, which she has moved to the shelf to make room. She does not examine why she moved it to the shelf specifically, rather than anywhere else.
In the morning, Jian comes by with coffee. He does not bring it from the place three blocks away this time, which means he is not in crisis and did not need the walk, which is something.
"How are you," he says.
"I'm fine," she says.
"You're moving into a palace tomorrow."
"I'm aware."
"To pretend to date a prince."
"Also aware."
He sits down on the edge of her bed and drinks his coffee and looks at the packed bag by the door, which contains her things for the first two weeks: clothes, her portable supply kit, the sketchbook she is currently working in, and the children's book manuscript, which she put in at the last moment without deciding to. He looks at the bag for a while and does not say anything, which is the version of Jian she finds most manageable.
"The provision is in section fourteen," she says. "Your details are not in there anywhere. You're not referenced at all."
He nods slowly. "I wasn't worried about that."
"I know. I'm telling you anyway."
He finishes his coffee. He leaves, and she locks the apartment, and she takes the bus for the third time in four days to the east gate of Kaelthorn Palace.
The signing room is smaller than the meeting room. It has the feel of a space used for things that are meant to be concluded rather than discussed: two chairs across a narrow table, a window overlooking an interior courtyard that has a single tree in it, bare-branched in the late season. The light from the courtyard is clean and directionless, the kind of light that does not flatter anything in particular and does not need to.
Kaeran is already there.
This is the first time she has entered a room he was already in, and the dynamic is slightly different from entering simultaneously or after him: he is settled, already oriented to the space, and she is the one adjusting. She adjusts without letting it show, which is a skill she has been practicing since before she had a word for it.
He is reading a document that is not the NDA, something with different formatting, held in one hand with the particular quality of attention she has now observed three times and is beginning to understand: he is reading it, not performing reading it. He does not look up when she enters. He does look up when she sits down.
"Ms. Min," he says.
"Your Highness," she says, because that is what the briefing materials said and she read the briefing materials.
A staff member places the NDA in front of each of them. The legal representative from the previous meeting is present at the far end of the table. Otherwise, it is the two of them and the clean courtyard light.
She reads through her copy of the NDA one more time, starting from section fourteen, then the signature pages. She is aware, in the way you become aware of things that are already there, that Kaeran has finished with his document and is reading his copy of the NDA. She is aware that he is also reading it in full. She files this.
The signing process is straightforward. The legal representative indicates the pages requiring signatures. Kaeran goes first.
He signs with the focused economy of someone who has signed a great many documents and does not treat it as a significant event. He sets the pen down on the page and reaches for his own document again. The legal representative slides the NDA across to Sora.
She picks up the pen.
The page is still warm from his hand.
This is a small thing. It is a piece of paper in a climate-controlled room, and body heat transfers to objects quickly and leaves them just as quickly. This is not a meaningful data point. She is aware of it anyway, in the same way she was aware in the corridor two days ago of the precise moment he unbuttoned his jacket: not because it means something, but because she is a person who notices things and she has apparently not developed a filter for which things are worth noticing.
She signs. She sets the pen down.
Kaeran looks up from his document.
"You didn't hesitate," he says.
"I read it beforehand," she says. "If you've already decided, hesitating is performance."
He looks at her with the expression she is slowly building a vocabulary for: not the assessment expression, not the managed-public expression. Something in between those, or below them. She has not found the right word for it yet.
"You have questions," he says. Not a question.
"I have one," she says. "You can say no."
He waits.
"Why does the morning brief list your schedule starting at five forty-five?"
There is a pause. She had expected the question to land somewhere between mildly off-topic and mildly inappropriate, which she thinks would have told her something interesting. Instead, he says:
"Five forty-five is when the overnight news briefing finishes. The schedule starts when the briefing ends."
"You read the overnight news briefing every day."
"Someone has to have read it before the eight o'clock calls."
"And that person is you."
"For the last four years, yes."
She looks at him. He is telling her something practical. He is also, without deciding to, telling her something else: that there is no one else he trusts to have read it first, or that he has not arranged it so there is someone else, or that four years ago he made a decision about how early he was willing to be responsible and has not revisited it since. She does not know which of these is true. She suspects all three might be, in different proportions.
"That's very early," she says.
"It is," he says.
"I wanted to know for the comic," she says. "That was the actual reason."
The corner of his mouth does something that is not quite a reaction and is not quite not a reaction. "I assumed."
"Did you?"
"No," he says. "But it seemed like the right thing to say."
She blinks. He picks up his document again. The legal representative begins gathering the signed copies. The room resumes being a room used for things that are meant to be concluded.
Coordinator Hael arrives to walk her to the residence wing, where her room has been prepared. The room is in the staff corridor of the residential section, which is, as the briefing materials noted, where senior household staff and long-term palace guests are typically housed. It is smaller than she expected and larger than she feared, with a window overlooking the same courtyard as the signing room, the single bare-branched tree visible from a different angle.
She sets her bag on the bed. She takes out the sketchbook and puts it on the desk. She takes out the supply kit and puts it next to the sketchbook. She takes out the children's book manuscript and stands in the middle of the room holding it for a moment, then puts it on the shelf above the desk.
Hael informs her that dinner is at seven in the residential dining room, that her schedule for the first week has been sent to her phone, and that if she needs anything she can reach the household coordinator at any time via the internal line. Then Hael leaves, and the room is quiet.
She sits on the bed.
She is, as of approximately forty minutes ago, the Crown Prince's girlfriend for all public purposes, for a period of three months beginning today. The document making this arrangement official is in a filing cabinet somewhere in this building. The pen she used to sign it is probably already back in a drawer.
She picks up her phone. She has a text from Jian that says: how's the palace. She types back: big. He sends back a photograph she does not need to see of her empty desk chair with a small sticky note that says her name on it, which is either sentimental or a threat and she is not certain which.
She puts the phone down. She opens the children's book manuscript. She looks at page forty-three, the last page she worked on, the one where the small creature is standing at the edge of something and has not yet determined whether to step forward.
She has been stuck on this page for four months.
She picks up a pencil. She is not going to work on it now. She is going to look at it and think about it and put it away. She reads the page. She looks at the sketch in the margin, the creature at the edge, the space ahead of it that she could not figure out how to draw.
She makes a small mark. A single line, the beginning of something in the space ahead, indistinct but present.
She stares at it.
Then she closes the manuscript, puts it back on the shelf, and goes to change for dinner.
In the corridor outside the residential dining room, she passes Kaeran going the other direction. He is with two people she does not know, speaking in low tones about something she does not catch. He does not break stride. But as he passes her, he says, without turning his head:
"Section fourteen."
She stops. He keeps walking, already turning the corner.
It takes her a moment.
He is telling her he knows she read it. He is telling her, in two words and without stopping, that he is aware she noticed the provision, that he registered she did not ask about it, and that he is choosing to acknowledge it now in the least inconvenient possible way. He is doing this in a corridor while continuing to be on his way somewhere else, which is the kind of precision she has been trying to capture in panels for eight months and has not quite managed.
She stands in the corridor for a moment.
Then she goes in to dinner.
The residential dining room is smaller than she expected and has the comfortable quality of a room that is used regularly rather than maintained for occasions. Two other household members are there, who introduce themselves with the manner of people who are professionally adept at welcoming new arrivals and do not need anything from her in return. She sits, she eats, she listens to a conversation about a logistics issue involving a delivery of something for the east garden. It is ordinary in the way that only specific and functional spaces can be ordinary: not performed, just inhabited.
She is going to live here for three months.
She looks at the single window at the end of the room, which shows the courtyard again, the bare-branched tree now in evening light, different from the morning version. She will see this tree every day from this angle. She will come to know it by season.
She takes out the small sketchbook she carries in her pocket and makes a quick study of the tree, just the shape of it, just the way the branches divide. She is not doing this for any particular purpose. She is doing it because she notices things and then draws them, and she has done this long enough that the two actions feel like one.
One of the other household members glances at the sketchbook and says: "You're the illustrator."
"Yes," she says.
"The one with the comic."
"Yes."
The person nods with the expression of someone filing information into a longer-term storage location, and returns to the logistics conversation.
Sora finishes her dinner. She goes back to her room. She sits at the desk under the window and opens the current sketchbook to a fresh page.
She is not going to draw him. She has drawn him twice in the last four days and both times something has come out that she does not know what to do with. She is going to draw the tree in the courtyard, which she has already started, which is a subject with no complications.
She draws the tree.
Halfway through, without deciding to, she draws a figure standing at the courtyard window on the opposite side. She gives the figure the specific posture of someone who has been reading since five forty-five in the morning and is only now, at this hour, doing something that is not work.
She looks at what she has drawn.
She does not close the sketchbook this time. She leaves the page open and goes to sleep.
In the corridor, she had not asked him how he knew she noticed. She had not asked what he was doing in the signing room forty-five minutes before the appointment time. These are the kinds of questions she decides not to ask, not because she does not want the answers, but because she has learned that some information arrives faster when you leave a space for it.
She is going to be here for three months.
There is time.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The NDA is forty-seven pages long, which Sora thinks is probably not a coincidence but is certainly a coincidence, and she reads all of it twice before she picks up a pen.
She reads it at her desk the evening before the signing, with the lamp on and the city doing its usual things outside the window, and she reads it the way she reads everything that matters: starting from the back, where the definitions and the exclusions live, then from the front, then once more from any page that made her pause. The language is dense in the way that legal language is designed to be dense, meaning it is precise but resistant to being understood quickly, and she is not in a hurry.
The provision about her professional work is in section fourteen, subsection three, added in language that does not match the stylistic register of the surrounding paragraphs. Someone added it after the original draft was written. Someone who knew enough about her working situation to know it needed to be in there.
She reads it three times. She puts the NDA face-down on the corner of the desk where the children's book manuscript used to be, which she has moved to the shelf to make room. She does not examine why she moved it to the shelf specifically, rather than anywhere else.
In the morning, Jian comes by with coffee. He does not bring it from the place three blocks away this time, which means he is not in crisis and did not need the walk, which is something.
"How are you," he says.
"I'm fine," she says.
"You're moving into a palace tomorrow."
"I'm aware."
"To pretend to date a prince."
"Also aware."
He sits down on the edge of her bed and drinks his coffee and looks at the packed bag by the door, which contains her things for the first two weeks: clothes, her portable supply kit, the sketchbook she is currently working in, and the children's book manuscript, which she put in at the last moment without deciding to. He looks at the bag for a while and does not say anything, which is the version of Jian she finds most manageable.
"The provision is in section fourteen," she says. "Your details are not in there anywhere. You're not referenced at all."
He nods slowly. "I wasn't worried about that."
"I know. I'm telling you anyway."
He finishes his coffee. He leaves, and she locks the apartment, and she takes the bus for the third time in four days to the east gate of Kaelthorn Palace.
The signing room is smaller than the meeting room. It has the feel of a space used for things that are meant to be concluded rather than discussed: two chairs across a narrow table, a window overlooking an interior courtyard that has a single tree in it, bare-branched in the late season. The light from the courtyard is clean and directionless, the kind of light that does not flatter anything in particular and does not need to.
Kaeran is already there.
This is the first time she has entered a room he was already in, and the dynamic is slightly different from entering simultaneously or after him: he is settled, already oriented to the space, and she is the one adjusting. She adjusts without letting it show, which is a skill she has been practicing since before she had a word for it.
He is reading a document that is not the NDA, something with different formatting, held in one hand with the particular quality of attention she has now observed three times and is beginning to understand: he is reading it, not performing reading it. He does not look up when she enters. He does look up when she sits down.
"Ms. Min," he says.
"Your Highness," she says, because that is what the briefing materials said and she read the briefing materials.
A staff member places the NDA in front of each of them. The legal representative from the previous meeting is present at the far end of the table. Otherwise, it is the two of them and the clean courtyard light.
She reads through her copy of the NDA one more time, starting from section fourteen, then the signature pages. She is aware, in the way you become aware of things that are already there, that Kaeran has finished with his document and is reading his copy of the NDA. She is aware that he is also reading it in full. She files this.
The signing process is straightforward. The legal representative indicates the pages requiring signatures. Kaeran goes first.
He signs with the focused economy of someone who has signed a great many documents and does not treat it as a significant event. He sets the pen down on the page and reaches for his own document again. The legal representative slides the NDA across to Sora.
She picks up the pen.
The page is still warm from his hand.
This is a small thing. It is a piece of paper in a climate-controlled room, and body heat transfers to objects quickly and leaves them just as quickly. This is not a meaningful data point. She is aware of it anyway, in the same way she was aware in the corridor two days ago of the precise moment he unbuttoned his jacket: not because it means something, but because she is a person who notices things and she has apparently not developed a filter for which things are worth noticing.
She signs. She sets the pen down.
Kaeran looks up from his document.
"You didn't hesitate," he says.
"I read it beforehand," she says. "If you've already decided, hesitating is performance."
He looks at her with the expression she is slowly building a vocabulary for: not the assessment expression, not the managed-public expression. Something in between those, or below them. She has not found the right word for it yet.
"You have questions," he says. Not a question.
"I have one," she says. "You can say no."
He waits.
"Why does the morning brief list your schedule starting at five forty-five?"
There is a pause. She had expected the question to land somewhere between mildly off-topic and mildly inappropriate, which she thinks would have told her something interesting. Instead, he says:
"Five forty-five is when the overnight news briefing finishes. The schedule starts when the briefing ends."
"You read the overnight news briefing every day."
"Someone has to have read it before the eight o'clock calls."
"And that person is you."
"For the last four years, yes."
She looks at him. He is telling her something practical. He is also, without deciding to, telling her something else: that there is no one else he trusts to have read it first, or that he has not arranged it so there is someone else, or that four years ago he made a decision about how early he was willing to be responsible and has not revisited it since. She does not know which of these is true. She suspects all three might be, in different proportions.
"That's very early," she says.
"It is," he says.
"I wanted to know for the comic," she says. "That was the actual reason."
The corner of his mouth does something that is not quite a reaction and is not quite not a reaction. "I assumed."
"Did you?"
"No," he says. "But it seemed like the right thing to say."
She blinks. He picks up his document again. The legal representative begins gathering the signed copies. The room resumes being a room used for things that are meant to be concluded.
Coordinator Hael arrives to walk her to the residence wing, where her room has been prepared. The room is in the staff corridor of the residential section, which is, as the briefing materials noted, where senior household staff and long-term palace guests are typically housed. It is smaller than she expected and larger than she feared, with a window overlooking the same courtyard as the signing room, the single bare-branched tree visible from a different angle.
She sets her bag on the bed. She takes out the sketchbook and puts it on the desk. She takes out the supply kit and puts it next to the sketchbook. She takes out the children's book manuscript and stands in the middle of the room holding it for a moment, then puts it on the shelf above the desk.
Hael informs her that dinner is at seven in the residential dining room, that her schedule for the first week has been sent to her phone, and that if she needs anything she can reach the household coordinator at any time via the internal line. Then Hael leaves, and the room is quiet.
She sits on the bed.
She is, as of approximately forty minutes ago, the Crown Prince's girlfriend for all public purposes, for a period of three months beginning today. The document making this arrangement official is in a filing cabinet somewhere in this building. The pen she used to sign it is probably already back in a drawer.
She picks up her phone. She has a text from Jian that says: how's the palace. She types back: big. He sends back a photograph she does not need to see of her empty desk chair with a small sticky note that says her name on it, which is either sentimental or a threat and she is not certain which.
She puts the phone down. She opens the children's book manuscript. She looks at page forty-three, the last page she worked on, the one where the small creature is standing at the edge of something and has not yet determined whether to step forward.
She has been stuck on this page for four months.
She picks up a pencil. She is not going to work on it now. She is going to look at it and think about it and put it away. She reads the page. She looks at the sketch in the margin, the creature at the edge, the space ahead of it that she could not figure out how to draw.
She makes a small mark. A single line, the beginning of something in the space ahead, indistinct but present.
She stares at it.
Then she closes the manuscript, puts it back on the shelf, and goes to change for dinner.
In the corridor outside the residential dining room, she passes Kaeran going the other direction. He is with two people she does not know, speaking in low tones about something she does not catch. He does not break stride. But as he passes her, he says, without turning his head:
"Section fourteen."
She stops. He keeps walking, already turning the corner.
It takes her a moment.
He is telling her he knows she read it. He is telling her, in two words and without stopping, that he is aware she noticed the provision, that he registered she did not ask about it, and that he is choosing to acknowledge it now in the least inconvenient possible way. He is doing this in a corridor while continuing to be on his way somewhere else, which is the kind of precision she has been trying to capture in panels for eight months and has not quite managed.
She stands in the corridor for a moment.
Then she goes in to dinner.
The residential dining room is smaller than she expected and has the comfortable quality of a room that is used regularly rather than maintained for occasions. Two other household members are there, who introduce themselves with the manner of people who are professionally adept at welcoming new arrivals and do not need anything from her in return. She sits, she eats, she listens to a conversation about a logistics issue involving a delivery of something for the east garden. It is ordinary in the way that only specific and functional spaces can be ordinary: not performed, just inhabited.
She is going to live here for three months.
She looks at the single window at the end of the room, which shows the courtyard again, the bare-branched tree now in evening light, different from the morning version. She will see this tree every day from this angle. She will come to know it by season.
She takes out the small sketchbook she carries in her pocket and makes a quick study of the tree, just the shape of it, just the way the branches divide. She is not doing this for any particular purpose. She is doing it because she notices things and then draws them, and she has done this long enough that the two actions feel like one.
One of the other household members glances at the sketchbook and says: "You're the illustrator."
"Yes," she says.
"The one with the comic."
"Yes."
The person nods with the expression of someone filing information into a longer-term storage location, and returns to the logistics conversation.
Sora finishes her dinner. She goes back to her room. She sits at the desk under the window and opens the current sketchbook to a fresh page.
She is not going to draw him. She has drawn him twice in the last four days and both times something has come out that she does not know what to do with. She is going to draw the tree in the courtyard, which she has already started, which is a subject with no complications.
She draws the tree.
Halfway through, without deciding to, she draws a figure standing at the courtyard window on the opposite side. She gives the figure the specific posture of someone who has been reading since five forty-five in the morning and is only now, at this hour, doing something that is not work.
She looks at what she has drawn.
She does not close the sketchbook this time. She leaves the page open and goes to sleep.
In the corridor, she had not asked him how he knew she noticed. She had not asked what he was doing in the signing room forty-five minutes before the appointment time. These are the kinds of questions she decides not to ask, not because she does not want the answers, but because she has learned that some information arrives faster when you leave a space for it.
She is going to be here for three months.
There is time.
You've reached the end of this chapter