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"What's that?"

"It's been exactly one year since you hired me to be your fake fiancée." She grins up at me, mischief dancing in her eyes. "Which means, technically, you paid me fifty thousand dollars for nothing."

"Not for nothing," I correct, automatically adjusting our path to avoid a cyclist. "For the best thing that's ever happened to me."

"Smooth talker." She bumps her hip against mine. "But seriously, it's kind of wild, isn't it? If you hadn't panicked and lied to Harrison about being engaged..."

"If Claire hadn't suggested I hire someone instead of asking a friend or colleague..."

"If I hadn't been desperate enough to agree to a completely insane proposition from a stranger in an expensive suit..."

I shake my head, still slightly amazed at the series of unlikely events that brought her into my life. "The statistical probability of all those factors aligning precisely as they did is?—"

"Don't you dare turn our love story into a math problem," she interrupts, but she's laughing. "Just admit it was fate."

"I admit nothing of the sort," I reply primly. "But I will acknowledge that I got extraordinarily lucky."

"So technically, you did pay me $50,000 for nothing," she says, circling back to her original point with the tenacity that both frustrates and delights me.

"I got you," I say simply. "Best investment ever."

Her expression softens, that rare moment of complete transparency where I can see exactly how much my words affect her. "Yeah, well. I got you too. Even with the color-coded sock drawer and the weird thing about how the coffee mugs have to face the same direction in the cabinet."

"That's not weird, it's efficient."

"It's definitely weird, but I love you anyway."

We reach the edge of the park, the city spreading before us in all its chaotic glory. Our life together is a constant negotiation—her disorder and my structure, her spontaneity and my planning, her emotional openness and my careful restraint. Every day requires adjustment, compromise, the occasional argument that still leaves me uncomfortable but that Josie insists is "healthy" and "normal" and "not a sign the relationship is imploding, Elliot, I promise."

Yet for all the challenges, for all the moments when her chaos threatens to overwhelm my order or my rigidity frustrates her free spirit, I wouldn't trade a single second. The dogs tangle their leashes around our legs, forcing us to stop and patiently unwind them—a perfect metaphor for our relationship, I think. Complicated, occasionally frustrating, requiring attention and care, but ultimately worth every moment of effort.

"What are you thinking about now?" Josie asks as we finally free ourselves from the canine-created web. "You've got that look again."

"I'm thinking that I love you," I say simply. "And that hiring you was the most irrational, impulsive, utterly perfect decision I've ever made."

She rises on her tiptoes to press a kiss to my lips, heedless of the passing crowd or the dogs circling our feet. "Told you going off-script occasionally works out," she murmurs against my mouth.

"In this case," I concede, pulling her closer despite the leashes and the ridiculous hat and all the practical reasons we should continue walking, "I'm willing to acknowledge you might have been right."

Her laughter against my lips feels like home, like the future, like everything I never knew I needed until Josie Palmer crashed into my perfectly ordered life and showed me what I'd been missing all along.