I put off the meeting for as long as I reasonably could, which turned out to be eleven days, until Karen brought it up so many times that avoiding it any longer would have looked suspicious instead of just busy. So on a Thursday afternoon, two weeks before her surgery, I brought Law to the hospital.
He didn't have to come. I half expected him to find an excuse — a meeting, a phone call, anything to avoid playing fiancé for an audience that didn't actually matter to the contract. But he showed up at the apartment that morning in a plain gray sweater instead of one of his usual sharp suits, like he'd actually thought about how to seem approachable to someone he'd never met.
"You don't have to do this," I told him, in the elevator up to the twelfth floor.
"I know," he said. "I'm doing it anyway."
Karen was sitting up in bed when we walked in, color better than I'd seen in weeks, hair brushed out for the occasion in a way that told me she'd been looking forward to this far more than she'd let on over the phone.
"Oh my god," she said, the second Law stepped past the curtain. "You weren't lying about the eyes."
"Karen," I said, mortified.
"What? I'm allowed to compliment my future brother-in-law," she said, grinning at him with the kind of open, unguarded delight she rarely showed anyone outside our family. "I'm Karen. Sorry in advance for whatever embarrassing things Alex has told you about me."
"Nothing embarrassing," Law said, and something in his voice had softened in a way I wasn't used to hearing directed at anyone but me. "Just that you're the most important person in his life."
Karen's whole face lit up at that, and I watched Law notice it too — watched something calculating and careful behind his eyes recognize exactly how much that single sentence had landed, and tuck the observation away for later, the way he tucked everything away.
"Sit, sit," Karen said, gesturing at the chair beside her bed like she owned the room. "Tell me everything. How'd you actually convince my brother to marry you? He's impossible. Genuinely the most stubborn person alive."
"He put up a fight," Law said, glancing at me with the ghost of a real smile. "I had to be patient."
"Patient," Karen repeated, delighted. "I like that. Most people give up on Alex after the first eye-roll."
"I've had worse received pitches," Law said, "in business."
"Oh, I bet you're terrifying in business," Karen said. "You've got that whole—" she gestured vaguely at his entire presence, "—brooding rich guy thing going on. I bet people are scared of you."
"Most people are," Law admitted.
"Are you scared of him?" Karen asked, turning to me.
"Not anymore," I said, which was, alarmingly, becoming more true by the week.
We stayed almost two hours, longer than I'd planned, mostly because Karen refused to let the conversation wind down. She asked Law about the casino, about his parents, about how he and I had actually met, listening to every answer like it was the most fascinating thing she'd heard in months — which, given the four walls and ceiling tiles that made up most of her world lately, it probably was.
"You're good with her," I said quietly, once Karen had finally drifted off mid-conversation, exhausted in the particular way recovery exhausted her.
"She's easy to be good with," Law said, looking at her sleeping form with an expression I couldn't quite read. "She's lonely. It's not hard to see."
"She's been in that bed for two years," I said. "Of course she's lonely."
"I know what that looks like," Law said, quieter now. "Being trapped somewhere you can't leave, watching everyone else's life happen without you."
I didn't ask him to elaborate, and he didn't offer to. We left not long after, Karen still asleep, and on the drive back I caught myself thinking — not for the first time, and with considerably more weight than before — that maybe this whole arrangement wasn't quite as one-sided as I'd told myself it was.
I didn't think, that day, to worry about what else Karen might have been feeling underneath all that delight. I should have. Looking back, the signs were already there — the way she'd watched him a little too closely, asked one too many follow-up questions, lit up a little brighter than two hours with a stranger usually warranted. But I was tired, and relieved, and so focused on keeping every plate spinning that I missed the one crack that would eventually bring half of them crashing down.