Osric backed away from Paige, frowned, crossed his arms, and paced across the length of the café with determination.

Paige met Harrison’s eyes across the table and mouthed behind her hand, “This is the guy who’s going to sort out my past?”

Harrison put his forehead into his clasped hands without answering her.

Paige chuckled.

Osric stopped and stared at her with gawking eyes. “You think this is funny?”

She looked at him levelly. “You’re acting like a chicken.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s right. You’re acting like a literal chicken picking its way across the coop. Haven’t you ever seen one?”

“No!” Disgusted, he balked, “She’s talking about chickens! I can’t even!”

“What’s wrong?” Narissa asked.

Cupping his hand around his mouth, Osric whispered something in her ear. Narissa glanced at Paige, nodded her head, grabbed Osric by the arm, and ushered him into the kitchen.

“This is utter rubbish,” Paige said, picking up her flavor packet of orange juice by the lip and swishing it around to help the crystals dissolve. “How can he tell if I’ve ever been hypnotized by just asking me a few dumb questions, making some weird drumming noises, and looking into my eyes? It’s stupid.”

Harrison pushed his hair out of his face and withheld judgment. 

No matter how chill Harrison was, her nerves were stretched like piano wire. Meeting with the detective bothered her. If he pieced together her past, would it make her better or worse? She had definitely seen Princess Elizabella before. She had been to the house for a special visit before Zaphier had bought Paige and Paige even had the chance to shake her hand. At that time, she didn’t know that their families were hoping to marry them off to each other. In her mind, their story never began.

The thing that made everything real to her was what Zaphier said the night he told the story about Rose Red. He said that the queen sent Rose Red away to be killed. When Rose Red returned to the kingdom, the queen was dead. It came as no surprise that Zaphier had been referring to someone real. He wasn't just talking about stealing Harrison’s money. The queen was Elizabella and she was going to die, just as Zaphier said, so he would be single again in the foreseeable future. Was he saying that he and Paige could still have a happily-ever-after? 

Except that Paige didn’t want it. Besides, she didn’t believe him. Everything he said was a lie.

A minute later, Narissa came out of the kitchen alone and sat down at their table. 

“Osric sends his apologies. He’s a private eye and not a doctor,” Narissa said quietly with her eyes fixed on Paige.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Paige mocked.

Narissa hesitated. For some reason, it was easier for her to take Narissa seriously than the weird detective with his shirt half unbuttoned. “He says that there are only two ways to do a memory wipe. One of them is for the patient to be hypnotized. That way, it might be possible to recover their memories. Most people who get memory wipes on themselves get it done this way because it's less invasive. The second way is to have your brain professionally damaged. The problem is… he says you’re the type of person who is impossible to hypnotize.”

Paige froze momentarily and gazed at Narissa’s hurt face. Narissa was saying indirectly that Paige was brain-damaged.

“It’s okay,” Paige said briskly. “I wasn’t planning on getting those memories back anyway.”

“You’re not worried about what happened to you back then?” Harrison asked.

“Not really. When I woke up in Sleeping Beauty Inc., I decided that I wasn’t going to worry about the kind of life I had and I’d only focus on the life I have.” Paige involuntarily glanced at the little scarf wrapped around her bracelet. She wanted to take it off and let everyone in town, if not the world, know the truth about her. 

“Well, I am worried about the time you can’t remember,” Harrison admitted. “I gave Osric my full permission to excavate your past.”

Paige shrugged her shoulders. “That’s your business.”

No one spoke. 

Narissa got up and went behind the counter to fill salt shakers. Harrison got out of the booth too and went into the kitchen, supposedly following Osric to have a word with him. 

Paige sat in her seat and finding herself bored, started stacking the condiments on the table into a tower.

Then a man came into the shop. Paige knew it was Wystan on sight—his shabby clothes, his unshaven face, the sickly look about his body like his ribcage was caving in while his belly stuck out. Paige had never spoken to him. He came in carrying grocery bags. He gave them to Narissa.

“Better check them,” he said gruffly. “Just to make sure I didn’t forget anything.”

Narissa fingered through them and said gratefully, “You remembered everything I needed. Thanks for going.” Then she planted a little kiss on his scratchy cheek and went to put the items in the kitchen.

Wystan poured himself a cup of coffee and slowly came around to the side of the bar that had stools and took a seat. Paige watched him pour more sugar into his cup than any human being had any right consuming when suddenly he turned to her and asked, “So, when are you and Harrison getting married?” 

“We’re not getting married,” she said evenly, thinking that their relationship was no one's business.

“Why not? Hasn’t he asked you?”

“That’s right,” she said slowly. “He hasn’t asked me.”

Wystan took a sip from his cup. “Well, there’s nothing like a woman asking you to turn your life around.” He got off the stool and followed Narissa into the kitchen.

Paige was dumbfounded as she watched him walk away. Did she have any right to ask for such a thing? The manual said she couldn't ask him to free her. Was it possible that it didn't forbid marriage proposals? 

She drummed her fingers on the table.

 

---

 

 

Two days later, Harrison sat in his bedroom. It was past midnight and he was up looking at his phone because he couldn’t sleep. He hadn’t expected any messages, but he had been on flights and hadn’t checked in hours. There was a message from Sleeping Beauty Inc. offering to repurchase Paige for twice what Harrison paid for her. He replied immediately, saying that he had no desire to sell her, but still, he was surprised. He wasn’t surprised by the message, he had been waiting for it. The thing that surprised him was the amount. Zaphier had paid 1.3 million dollars for her the first time and now she was only worth a little over four-hundred-thousand for a lifetime investment? It was astonishing.

The other thing on Harrison’s mind was Paige herself. She had moved all her belongings into the spare bedroom and gave up on the tower entirely. She threw away Zaphier's notes and gave Harrison more space than even a recluse needed. 

One thing was certain. Harrison couldn’t go on like this, so he had been arranging and rearranging battle plans. The most sensible plan he had come up with was to give her the papers to set her free and then give her an engagement ring in the same breath. If she didn’t want to be with him then she’d just take the papers and leave. Harrison couldn’t even think about doing that until the debt was paid. 

On the other end of the spectrum, the rashest plan he’d made was just to grab her in the hall and kiss her. It was a gamble to lay one finger on her before the release papers had been signed because she could say that she had to do whatever he wanted. After all, he was her master.

Harrison was just about to throw down his phone in frustration when a new message appeared. It was from Osric. Harrison clicked on it. It read:

“Thanks for giving me clearance to check Paige out in more detail. Having access made all the difference. Here’s what I found out so far. Paige was in the hospital three times in the nine months that she belonged to Zaphier. Once for a broken wrist, once for an all-out beating, and once for a sprained ankle (she fell down a flight of stairs). She also did a lot of traveling without him to some pretty strange countries. Some of which have been known to have illegal M.T.N. operations. She may have been asked to transport samples of the disease for him, which could be why he wanted her memory wiped. I’ll let you know if I find out anything else in a few days.”

Harrison got up to vent, but he didn’t want Paige to hear so he clamped his teeth together and through his set teeth he hummed all the awful things he wanted to say about Zaphier while he walked a hole in the floor.

Then a knock came at the door.

“Yes,” Harrison said, forcing himself to calm down. 

Paige opened the door a crack and put her face in. “What are you doing?”

“I’m always like this,” Harrison said. He moved to lean his arm on the dresser, missed, and had to catch himself to stop from falling. He brought himself upright and brushed off his shirt to help him regain his composure. “You just didn’t notice because you were always up in the tower and couldn’t hear me. Speaking of which,” he said, noting her bare legs. “What can we do to make the tower habitable for you again?”

“Is it making you uncomfortable for me to sleep down here?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” he said, wishing she wouldn't make him spell it out. Having her up in the tower made him feel like she was on the moon, but having her in the next room made her feel too close. Instead of mentioning any of that, he feigned, “I don’t want you to hear me talking to myself.”

She scrunched up her nose.

“Before you came, I lived here alone for six years and I learned to talk to myself.”

“Six years!” she exclaimed. 

“Yeah,” he said calmly, sitting down on the bed. “Didn’t I tell you?”

Paige opened the door the rest of the way and came in. Sitting down on the bed beside him, she said, “No, you didn’t.”

Harrison didn’t normally talk about how he ended up alone in the middle of nowhere. It was mostly because there was no need to. The people in town knew what happened. They had been there for it. They had worked in the hospital, seen him around town, and gone to the funerals. Everyone knew. Since they knew, it wasn’t often that he had to talk about it. 

He may as well tell Paige about his family. It would make her the first person he had confided in since he spoke to the mortician at the crematorium.

“My mom contracted M.T.N. when I was sixteen. After that, she only lived with us for six months before we had to take her to the hospital for continued treatment. My father got it two months before my mother died. The nurse at the hospital told me that he wouldn’t follow hospital regulations and he wouldn’t stop taking off his rubber glove to hold her hand. You know, skin on skin.” Harrison didn’t look at Paige while he spoke. He didn’t know how she would take such a confession or if he wanted to see how she took it. He kept his face averted as he continued. “My father died when I was twenty-one. The disease took him a lot faster. He didn’t try very hard once my mother was gone, and it’s not like I was a baby, so…” 

Harrison stopped talking. Paige slid her hand under his. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It wasn’t like they had never touched. She had stretched her legs across his knees before and he had rubbed her shoulders, but those sorts of contact always felt like the mildest form of flirting or friendship—not like love. 

He tried to keep talking. “I have an older brother. He left home when I was a kid. I haven’t heard from him in years and I’ll be surprised if he ever comes back…” 

He couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. Paige’s touch felt different than it had all those other times. She must love him. Something was holding her back.

Suddenly, he grasped her hand tightly and Paige tried to recoil, but he held on.

Their eyes met and their faces came closer together with their foreheads touching. 

“I like this. Being here with you.”

She breathed in and it was like she was breathing him in. “Being here with you makes me forget who I am. I like forgetting.”

He moved away from her, only an inch, but their faces stopped touching. She was never going to forget that he had bought her and that was the real reason she was with him in the first place.

“Pretend I don’t own you,” he said, looking into her eyes. “Pretend you don’t have to do what I say. Pretend you could walk out tonight if you wanted to and I wouldn’t do anything to stop you. If all that were true, would you leave?”

Paige bit her lip hesitantly. “I can never go home.”

“Pretend you could.”

“I’m not trained to do anything.”

“Pretend you are.”

He was wearing her down. He could see it in her eyes. 

Then it came out of her like a broken sprinkler suddenly coming on. “You could have bought anyone and you would have fallen in love with her! Anyone! I’m not special.”

“You think that the fact that I bought you makes you ordinary? I had a choice. I could have picked another girl. I wanted you.”

Paige was sniffling, but Harrison wouldn’t let go of her hand and he wouldn’t stop talking.

“Come on, I didn’t buy you to be an object to me. And tomorrow I’m going to sell part of Excalibur to pay your debt. Until you came, Excalibur was the most important thing in the world to me. Now, you’re all that matters.”

“You’re holding me too hard,” she whimpered. 

Harrison eased up, but he had one more thing to add, so he didn’t let her go. “To say that it was love-at-first-sight is going too far, but I liked you when I chose you.”

“But what if you don’t feel that way forever and you marry someone else?”

He stared. This was what she had been worrying about! “I would never marry someone else.”

From the look on her face, nothing had changed. He had to set her free if he wanted her to choose him. 

He let go of her hand.

_________________

Author's Notes: THANKS FOR READING!  I would normally post the next chapter on Thursday, but I will not be available at all on Thursday, so I'll see you Saturday!