"Well then. I shall endeavor to remain sane."

The next few days are fine - not eventful, but fine. She rewrites her resume and looks up job postings, trying to find something that doesn’t sound very horrible. She finds a church and attends it on Sunday and crosses it off her list when the pastor assets that the resurrection is probably just about how Jesus is metaphorically alive in our hearts. She watches movies with Lev and in general notes that he is just, like, very improbably fine as a person, particularly a person who thinks that getting hugs through a company called Billionaire Marriage Brokers is something resembling a good idea.

She calls her parents and gets her mom and asks her to put Connor on. Her mom does not put Connor on.

     “I can’t believe you lied to us, Karen. Something for your church.”

 Her heart sinks into her stomach. “Mom - "

      “I want you to tell me exactly where you are and what you’re doing.”

 “I’m in San Francisco. Or, like, outside it - "

     “Where in San Francisco, Karen.”

She pauses for too long. She doesn’t want to lie but - they have Connor and Zana - she shouldn’t have asked them to watch them - she doesn’t know who she should have asked but she shouldn’t have asked her parents, not if she was going to do this - 

Why did the lawyers even bother telling her that she can talk about The Relationship to her friends and family, everyone in the universe is going to know from two seconds in that it isn’t a real relationship because nobody from this corner of the world would ever actually care about her, ever, under any circumstances - 

What if her mom decides the only way she can get her back is to go to the police - what if she knows someone vaguely journalist-y and thinks that raising a stink will help somehow, what if Lev isn’t not-famous enough for everyone to think that it’s a waste of time - what even happens to you if you have zero money and you get sued a bunch of money you don’t have, she should probably not even be scared of this because probably debtors' prisons aren’t even a thing anymore, although maybe they’ll garner like seventy percent of her wages for the rest of her entire life or something and she’ll have to be one of those people in movies who’s always running out the back door whenever anyone suspicious comes by because she owes people money she doesn’t have -

Her parents are never going to take her seriously ever, not ever - 

“I’m in a house in Marin,” she says. “Staying with a friend and sending out job applications. You don’t know him.”

      “I know you’re staying with someone named Lev Aarons. Now I assume that’s not the person that Forbes seems to think is a billionaire?”

 She’s silent for too many seconds.

      “Oh, Karen.”

 “ - Kate told you.”

     “What did he offer you to sleep with him?”

“Mom!”

      “If he hasn’t already asked then he’s going to. I know you want to help Zana, we all want to help Zana, but this isn’t a sustainable way of doing that, you’re going to get hurt - "

And her mom says more things that Karen doesn’t remember because her brain isn’t working right after that. She doesn’t remember whether she breaks the NDA. She’s pretty sure she asked about whether her mother could help get Connor and Zana here and is pretty sure that her mother vehemently questioned her ability to be a remotely responsible guardian for either. 

She hangs up in the middle of the conversation, already sobbing, with the words you cannot solve this by whoring yourself out ringing in her ears.

She wishes she could be entirely certain that her mother isn’t just - right. She’s probably nonzero right. Cinderella is a lovely character, but in real life princes don’t marry commoners. Much less do they solve all their problems merely for the joy of their company.

She is such an idiot. She is such an idiot. If she were less of an idiot she would go home right now and go back to work like nothing happened and wait for her mother to drop Connor and Zana off, and then -

And then what, watch Zana wither away and die before her eyes? Justify herself before the Almighty at the end of days by saying that, well, no, Lev never actually asked her to do any immoral things ever, she just let her child die because she was scared that he might?

In the morning she washes her face and dries her eyes and wanders aimlessly around the house for a few hours before working up the nerve to knock on Lev’s door.

"Hey! What's up?"

"Hey!" Man how does she say anything relevant without lying or blowing up the entire world. "So I called my parents about maybe picking up Connor and Zana soon, and they are sooort of skeptical about the idea."

"...I guess that makes sense because this is in fact a moderately sketchy and hard-to-explain situation."

"Yeah. Yes. Moderately."

"Do you think you'll be able to get them or...? I was going to try to finish that sentence with some way I could help but I actually don't have one."

"...Yeah, I give myself like an eighty percent chance of getting them without resorting to actions that would be kidnapping if I were not in fact their legal guardian. Under the circumstances. On the first try."

"I can get you a very good lawyer if you ever think that would help."

"It's - possible it will, at some point. Though I should probably at least try the option where I go to my parent's house and talk this out with them like a sane person. Are you cool if I, uh, take a couple days off from the mental strain of discussing Batman to fly across the country?"

"Why wouldn't I be okay with that?"

"...Because I am here for reasons, and sometimes when people ask you to be in a specific place for a reason, they think that the reason is nonzero important and should ever trade off against other concerns? And it's polite to make sure even if you're pretty sure you know how the calculation works out?"

"I realized that when I decided to do this thing with someone with kids that I was always going to come in second to the kids, that is how having children works."

"OK! Well. That's good. Because you are correct. And because when I am separated from them I start drawing up heist plans."

"Please don't do a heist plan, my lawyers aren't that good."

"I'll keep that in mind."

Oh wow the internal screaming has stopped now. Lev is sort of anomalously good at stopping the internal screaming. This is sort of unexpected, given that he should logically be the source of a lot of it, but it's kind of nice. 

"I'll, uh, look at plane tickets then. I guess."

"You can ask Shelly to do it if you'd rather but you don't have to."

"I, uh." Oh man, three plane tickets on short notice is probably going to wipe out at least half of the two thousand dollars that she's not sure she even technically has yet, maybe all of it. She should probably mention this or something. It's not like the two thousand dollars are that important but they're also sort of all the money she's going to get for the next six months unless she successfully gets a job somehow. But she also can't say that she doesn't have any money, because she does, she has the ten thousand dollars that she really wanted to save. But sometimes we don't get what we want. And there's the screaming again.

"Maybe."

"You look worried, is something wrong?"

"I - uh - I don't super have enough money for last-minute plane tickets. Actually. I mean technically I do, but. Technically."

"...Is there a reason I'm not covering them?"

"Just - I mean I don't know which things I should assume that about. I guess this is a fairly unambiguous example insofar as unambiguous examples exist, given that they wouldn't be flying in if not for - this whole situation, but - sure."

"I guess maybe it wasn't super-clear? I should cover anything you want as long as the thing you want costs less than, I don't know, one hundred thousand dollars. Then we can talk about it."

"......oh."

"I have a lot of money and I like you and I like doing nice things for people I like," he says.

"And it's not like the fact that you're only friends with me for my money will get any worse," he doesn't say.