The disaster, Mara Bellamy decided, would make excellent content.

She was sitting on the low stone wall outside the offices of Coastline Digital, a cardboard box balanced on her knees, and the whole of Nice was doing its best impression of a postcard around her. The sea beyond the Promenade des Anglais was the flat, glittering blue of an expensive screensaver. A man on a rented bicycle rang his bell at a pigeon. Somewhere behind her, on the fourth floor, a woman named Ines from Human Resources was probably still rehearsing the phrase "restructuring of creative verticals" in the mirror.

Mara lifted her phone, tilted it toward her own face, and found the light.

"So," she said, in the voice. The camera voice was bright and a little breathless, the voice of a friend who had just discovered a wonderful bakery and could not wait to tell you about it. "Today I learned that a company can fire you and give you a tote bag in the same meeting. The tote bag says Grow Together. I have never felt less grown, or more together with a tote bag."

She held the tote bag up to the lens. She smiled. She counted to three in her head, the way she always did, and then she lowered the phone and did not press record.

The smile stayed on her face for another second, out of habit, like a light left on in an empty room.

Then it went out, and she was just a twenty-six-year-old woman on a wall with a cardboard box that contained a succulent, a mug shaped like a croissant, a tangle of charging cables, and a framed photograph of herself at a press event looking radiant and utterly fake.

She put the phone in her pocket.

It was eleven in the morning on a Tuesday in early June. She had been employed for three years, four months and nine days. She had a rent payment due in eleven days, a credit card that had stopped being a tool and become a personality trait, and, as of about forty minutes ago, no income at all.

"Fine," she said to the pigeon, which had wandered over to inspect her. "Fine. It's fine. I have been in worse situations. I once spent four hours on a train outside Lyon with a man who ate an entire rotisserie chicken with his hands."

The pigeon, unimpressed, went away.

Mara walked home. It took forty minutes, because she refused to pay for the tram, and because walking was the only thing that ever quieted the small, fast animal that lived under her ribs and ran laps whenever something went wrong. By the time she reached the narrow street in the old town where she rented the top floor of a building older than most countries, the animal had slowed to a trot.

Her apartment was two rooms and a terrace the size of a bath mat. It smelled of coffee and sun-warmed plaster and the basil she kept alive out of pure spite. She dropped the box on the table, kicked off her sandals, and opened her laptop, because the only thing to do with panic was to make it into a list.

Rent. Phone. The card. The small, humiliating loan from her mother's cousin that she had promised to repay by spring. She wrote the numbers in a column and added them up and looked at the total for a long time.

It was not a large number, as numbers went. It was just larger than the one in her bank account, which was the only comparison that mattered.

She closed the spreadsheet and opened her email instead, and there it was, sitting three lines from the top where it had been sitting for nine days.

Subject: Following up, Senior Producer role, Lisbon.

She had read it so many times she could have recited it. A small, respected travel studio on the river in Lisbon. A team of eight. A salary that was not glamorous but was real. A gentle, professional line at the end: We would love to hear from you by the end of the month.

She had not replied. She had not declined either. She had simply let it sit there, glowing faintly, like the emergency exit sign in a cinema. Nobody planned to use the emergency exit. It was just very comforting to know where it was.

"Not yet," she told the screen. "Ask me on Friday."

Her phone buzzed against the table.

Unknown number, French, a Nice landline. She stared at it. Nobody called anymore. People who called were either dentists or people who wanted something, and she was in no state to meet either.

She answered anyway, because the animal under her ribs wanted to know.

"Allô?"

"Mademoiselle Bellamy?" It was a man's voice, dry and courteous, the voice of someone who wore a waistcoat and meant it. "My name is Hugo Laurent. I am a notary and attorney at law, with an office on Rue de la Préfecture. I hope I am not disturbing you."

"Depends," Mara said. "Is this the part where you tell me a distant uncle has left me a castle?"

There was a pause. It was the pause of a man who did not often get jokes and had decided to forgive this one.

"Not a castle," Hugo Laurent said. "But I have a proposal on behalf of a client, and it is time sensitive. I would prefer to explain in person."

"Which client?"

"I am afraid I cannot say by telephone."

"Right," said Mara, who had once had her credit card number stolen by a man pretending to be a hotel concierge. "And if I were a person who did not walk into strange offices because a stranger on the phone was polite, what would you say to that?"

"I would say that it is a very sensible policy," Hugo Laurent replied, without hesitation. "And I would suggest you look up my office, my registration with the Chambre des Notaires, and the photograph of me on the firm's website, in which I am wearing an unfortunate tie. Then I would suggest you come at three o'clock. The fee for the consultation is nothing. The proposal, if you accept it, is thirty thousand euros."

Mara was silent long enough that she heard him breathing.

"That's a very specific amount to say to a woman who just lost her job," she said.

"I was not aware that you had lost your job," said Hugo. "I am sorry to hear it. It does not change the offer."

She looked up the firm. She looked up the registration. The tie was, in fact, unfortunate. There was a cluster of reviews from grateful widows and one furious man who had disliked his inheritance. Everything was boring and legitimate, in the best possible way.

At two thirty she put on her one good linen jacket, told herself it was research, and went.

The office was on the second floor of a cream-colored building with green shutters and an elevator the size of a wardrobe. There was a receptionist with silver hair and a name plate that said Madame Rey, who offered her water in a real glass and did not ask a single question, which Mara found more suspicious than any question could have been.

Hugo Laurent turned out to be around sixty, tall and narrow, with rimless glasses and the posture of a man who had never once slouched in his life. His office was full of leather-bound books, pale gold light, and the smell of old paper. The window looked over a courtyard with a lemon tree.

"Mademoiselle Bellamy. Thank you for coming." He shook her hand once, firmly, and gestured to a chair. "May I ask if you have ever heard of the Mercer family?"

"Should I have?"

"Not necessarily. Elena Mercer passed away in the winter, at the age of sixty-one. She had a house in Villefranche-sur-Mer, and two children. I am the executor's attorney for her estate." He folded his hands. "The terms of her will are unusual. A condition was attached to the house."

"What kind of condition?"

"A journey," said Hugo. "Twelve places along the Mediterranean coast, to be visited in order, within ninety days, by her son. Accompanied by another person. There is a written record to be kept at each place, in a form I will describe if you agree to proceed. If the conditions are met, the house is retained by the family. If not, it is sold to settle the taxes on the estate."

"And the accompanying person is me."

"The accompanying person is to be someone of the son's choosing." Hugo's face did not change. "He has chosen you."

Mara laughed. It came out as a short, incredulous exhale. "Why would a man I've never met choose me to walk around the Riviera?"

"I did not say you had never met him."

On the desk between them, next to a green-shaded lamp, lay a small object she had noticed on entering and told herself to ignore. It was a notebook, cloth-bound, the blue of old denim gone soft at the corners. It looked as though it had been carried in many pockets and opened by many hands. Someone had tied it shut with a length of faded yellow ribbon.

She looked at it for a moment too long. Something in her chest moved, small and strange, the way it does when a song you have never heard turns out to be familiar.

"What's the notebook?" she said.

"The list," Hugo said. "The twelve places. Written by the late Madame Mercer's hand, in effect. It is the only guide the family has."

"In effect?"

"That is a question for the client."

"And you can't tell me the client's name."

"I could," said Hugo. "But I believe he would prefer to say it himself." He glanced past her shoulder, toward the door. "In fact, I believe he is here."

The door had opened without a sound.

The man who stood in it was tall, and he held himself as if the room were slightly too bright. Dark hair, tousled in a way that suggested he had stopped caring about it in about 2019. A gray shirt with the sleeves pushed up, a canvas bag on one shoulder, a leather strap around his neck that ended, at his hip, in nothing at all. There was a faint pale line on his throat where a heavy camera usually hung. Someone had taken the weight off, and his body had not yet forgiven the absence.

Stubble. Tired eyes, very dark, with the quality of not having decided whether to look at you.

Mara knew him before he spoke.

She knew the jaw. She knew the particular set of the shoulders, the stillness, the way he seemed to be standing at the edge of a frame even when there was no frame. It had been two years, and it came back in a single cold rush: a crowded foyer in Lyon, the sour smell of stale champagne, the ridiculous badge on her lapel that said PRESS.

Julian Mercer. Documentary filmmaker. Winner of two festival prizes and a reputation for never, ever giving an interview.

She had been twenty-four and desperate to be noticed, and she had put a microphone in front of his face on the steps of a screening. He had looked at her, and at the phone in her other hand recording it all, and he had said absolutely nothing for eleven full seconds. Then he had turned and walked away.

She had posted the clip that night. She had captioned it, God help her, When you ask a genius a question and he responds with the wisdom of a houseplant.

It had gotten four million views by morning.

She had told herself for two years that it had been a joke. She had told herself that he was a public figure and that it was harmless and that nobody remembered. She had not, in two years, watched the clip again. She had not been able to. There was a moment at the very end, after the eleven seconds, when he glanced at her instead of the lens. It was not angry. It was something worse. It was tired, and a little hurt, and unsurprised.

Mara had remembered that look every single week since.

"Miss Bellamy," said Julian Mercer.

His voice was low and even, unhurried, as though every word had been weighed and found only barely worth the effort. He stayed in the doorway.

"Mr. Mercer," she said. Her own voice came out perfectly bright. The camera voice, arriving like a fire crew. "What a surprise. I love what you've done with the silence."

Hugo Laurent made a small sound that might have been a cough.

Julian did not smile. But something moved at the corner of his mouth, and it was gone before she could name it.

"You remember," he said.

"Vividly." She crossed her legs and lifted her chin. "You'll be pleased to know I've had two years of therapy, and it's been mostly about that clip."

"Have you."

"No. But it's the sort of thing people say."

He came into the room then, and sat down in the chair beside hers, not close, leaving the width of a small table between them. He set the canvas bag by his boot. He looked at the notebook on the desk and not at her.

"I want you to understand something before Hugo goes on," he said. "I did not choose you because I forgot."

"That's comforting."

"I chose you because I didn't."

Mara opened her mouth and, for the first time in years, found nothing waiting there.

Hugo cleared his throat. "Perhaps," he said gently, "it would be best if Monsieur Mercer explained the nature of the arrangement."

Julian exhaled through his nose. He put both forearms on his knees and looked at the floorboards, and she watched him assemble the sentence the way a man might pick up something breakable.

"The will says I have to go with a partner," he said. "The word in French is compagne. Companion. Partner. It's ambiguous, and Hugo's read it four times, and the reading he believes is most defensible is the one where it means..." He stopped. Started again. "A partner in the romantic sense."

"You need a girlfriend," Mara said.

"I need someone who can appear to be one."

The room was very quiet. A car horn sounded faintly in the street below. Madame Rey's typing, muffled through the wall, went on and on.

"To be clear," Mara said slowly, "you want to hire me to pretend to be your girlfriend. For ninety days. Across twelve places. In front of a lawyer."

"Yes."

"Me. Specifically."

"Yes."

She laughed.

It rose in her before she could stop it, wild and unstoppable, and she covered her mouth with the back of her hand and laughed into her knuckles until her eyes stung. It was not entirely amusement. Some of it was the animal under her ribs, running an entire marathon in the space of a second.

Julian waited. He did not look offended. He looked like a man who had known exactly how this would go and had come anyway.

"I'm sorry," she managed. "I'm sorry, it's just, you know I'm the worst possible candidate. I'm the woman who made you a meme."

"I know."

"You hate everything I do."

"I do."

"You hate the phone, the camera voice, the whole..." She waved a hand, gesturing at the concept of her. "The performance. You hate the performance. You once walked out of a room rather than answer one question."

"I did."

"And you want me to perform being in love with you. Professionally."

"Yes," said Julian, and finally, finally, he looked at her, straight on. The dark eyes were very steady. "That's what makes it possible. You're good at it. It's the only thing I've ever seen you do that I couldn't fault."

She stared at him.

It was, by any measure, the strangest compliment she had ever received. It was also the first one in a year that had felt like it cost the person something to say.

"Thirty thousand euros," Hugo said quietly. "Paid in full at the conclusion of the ninety days. A retainer of five thousand at signing. Expenses covered. Your own room, wherever the circumstances allow." He paused. "There are further conditions, which I would explain at the signing, but I want to be honest with you, Mademoiselle. This will not be easy. The terms require a degree of... authenticity that is not simple to perform."

"Authenticity," Mara repeated. "For a fake relationship."

"Yes."

"That's a contradiction in terms."

"It is," said Hugo. "I did not write it."

She looked at the notebook again. The yellow ribbon. The soft blue cloth. The strangeness came back, that small tug behind the breastbone, as if the thing were looking at her rather than the other way around.

"Who wrote it, then?" she said. "The condition. Elena Mercer?"

Julian's face closed like a door.

"Yes," he said.

"Why would your mother want you to..."

"I don't know."

"You don't..."

"I don't know," he said again, more quietly. "That's the point, Miss Bellamy. If I knew, I wouldn't need to go."

For a moment they simply looked at each other across the little table, two people who had once been on opposite ends of a camera. Mara saw, with the sudden clarity of a thing she did not want to see, the small line of tension along his jaw. She saw the pale mark on his throat where the camera should have been. She saw that he had not slept.

She thought: he is afraid.

She thought: of course he is. He is about to walk into a house he has not been able to walk into.

She did not know where the thought had come from. It arrived fully formed, like a postcard from someone else.

"Let me think about it," she said, and stood.

Her knees were not entirely steady. Hugo rose with her, courteous to the last. "Of course. I would ask for an answer by the end of the week. The ninety days begin at signing, and the sooner..."

"By Friday," Mara said. "You'll have it by Friday."

She looked at Julian one last time. He had not stood. He was watching her with an expression she could not read, and she disliked very much that she wanted to.

"You could have hired anyone," she said.

"I know."

"Anyone who didn't have a reason to think you were unbearable."

"I know that too."

"Then why?"

He seemed to consider the question with real care, as though it were a lens he was checking for flaws.

"Because you saw me," he said. "In Lyon. You saw exactly what I was trying not to show. You put it on the internet, which was unforgivable." He paused. "But you saw it."

Mara did not trust herself to answer.

She said, "Goodbye, Mr. Mercer," and walked out past the silver-haired receptionist and down the wardrobe-sized elevator and into the hot afternoon, where the sun hit her like a hand on the back of the neck.

She walked for a long time. She did not take the tram.

By the time she climbed the narrow stairs to her apartment, the light had turned gold and slanted, and her thighs ached, and the animal under her ribs had finally lain down. She stood in the middle of the room in her linen jacket and did not turn on a lamp.

Thirty thousand euros. The loan, gone. The card, gone. The rent, a year of it, folded neatly away.

Ninety days of Julian Mercer.

She thought about the way he had said you saw me, as though it were a crime he was confessing on her behalf.

At nine o'clock she sat cross-legged on the bed with the laptop open and the window wide to the sound of the street. The Lisbon email was still there, glowing faintly.

She hit reply.

She typed: Dear Ana, thank you so much for your patience. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I will not be able to take up the position at this time.

She read it three times. It looked so final, so sensible, so very much like the letter of a woman who knew what she wanted. Her finger hovered over the send key. The cursor blinked, patient and pale.

She deleted it, one letter at a time, until the screen was clean again.

Then she opened a new message, and typed a different address, and wrote three words with her heart going at a speed that had nothing to do with money.

Send me the terms.

She pressed send before the animal could talk her out of it, and shut the laptop, and lay back on the bed with her hand over her eyes.

From the terrace came the faint smell of the sea and the basil, and the sound of the old town settling down for the night.