I came to buy my father out of a grave, and the woman across the desk slid me a page with no number on it.

I'd rehearsed this on the drive up. Past the iron gate that someone had bothered to oil, up a hill that took its time, I ran the speech a fixer runs: open generous, find the real figure, close fast. I am good at finding the real figure. The real figure is where people keep their shame, and shame is the only thing anyone has ever actually sold me.

So I took the page. Heavy stock, cream gone gold at the edge. A column of dates in a hand I half-knew, and a wax seal pressed beside the name Seld that meant nothing to me and clearly everything to the room. No number. Not a blank where a number should sit. A page built so a number had never once been welcome.

"There's no figure," I said, and gave her the smile, the one that's talked me out of two lawsuits and a fistfight. "In my experience the absence of a figure is where the real money lives. So tell me what I'm buying, and we'll get to a number we both pretend to hate."

She didn't smile back. Not unkindly. She let my line go where lines go when nobody catches them, out into the lamp-lit air and down, the way a coin drops in a dry well while you wait for a splash that doesn't come.

Maret Aubrac. She'd given the name once, at the door, and not again. Dark hair gone silver at the temples, worn back off a face that had settled a long time ago on having nothing to prove. The lamp threw yellow across the desk and the open book between us, and the room held that flat mineral smell of cold ink, of a pen that has scratched a great many lines into a great many years.

"Your father's debt to this House isn't money," she said. "It never was."

"Everything's money. That's the good news. It just doesn't always know it yet."

"Read the contract."

She turned a second page toward me, typed this time, and set a pen on the wood with no more ceremony than you'd set down a teacup. I read it because reading the document is the job. And because the alternative was looking at her, and I'd already clocked that I did not love what looking at her did to the back of my neck.

It was a real contract. That was the first wrong thing. I'd come braced for a velvet trap, perfumed nonsense about honor and obligation, and instead there were clauses. Term of service, open-ended, discharged at the House's judgment or by a permanent signing that cleared the family name. A safeword, given as a plain word in plain type. A weekly review of the arrangement, both parties present. A line stating that the resident's door would remain unlocked at all hours.

And a clause about disclosure of prior arrangements.

I read that one aloud. I have a voice I do for documents, a fussy little butler, and I used it then because the quiet in the room was getting under my collar. "The party of the second part shall disclose any prior arrangement of a comparable nature," I read, in the butler, "the better to ensure the second party's"... and the word safety sat there waiting, and my voice did a thing it does not do. It caught. One syllable. A hairline crack and gone.

I covered it. I'm very fast. "...continued enjoyment of being bossed about, I assume. Bold of a contract to assume."

She heard it anyway. I watched her hear it. She didn't lean in, didn't soften, didn't do a single thing people do when they think they've found the seam in you. She looked at me a beat longer than the joke had earned, the way you study a lock you've already picked to see whether the owner knows you're inside.

"Sign or don't," she said. "The door's that one. It's unlocked. It stays unlocked."

I should have stood up. I want that on the record. A smarter man stands.

Instead I thought about the lien. About my cousin Nort, who'd rung three times since the funeral in that warm voice he wears right before he takes something, asking how I was holding up, whether I'd seen the estate paperwork yet. About the word sitting in this woman's ledger beside my father's name, a word nobody had said to me but whose shape I could already feel. About being a Seld, which had never in my life been an advantage and was apparently now a debt without even the decency of a price tag.

I picked up the pen. The barrel was cold. Everything in that room ran a few degrees under where it should, like the House kept its own weather and saw no reason to share.

"For the record," I said, signing, "I'm doing this ironically."

"So noted," she said. She took the page back, pressed her thumb to the wet ink to be sure it had set, and that small ordinary motion did something to my pulse I wasn't going to look at directly. "On your feet."

I stood. My knees were fine. My knees were excellent.

"Now," Maret Aubrac said, in the same voice she'd used to tell me where the door was, "knees."

The floor was farther down than I'd braced for.