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I pressed my wrapped wrist against my thigh under the table. “Cash—”

“How many?”

“The water situation—”

“How many, Priya.”

I looked at the lamp. The shade was angled away from my eyes, the way he’d angled it that first morning, the small adjustment he made without being asked because he noticed where the light fell.

“All of them,” I said.

He nodded once. Not surprised. Not angry. The nod of a man confirming what he already knew, the way a foreman confirmed a count.

“Three days,” he said. “You haven’t slept more than three hours any night. You haven’t eaten lunch any day. Your phone hasn’t been off since the hydrologist’s email. You’ve been working until midnight and starting again at five.”

“The creek can’t supply August volumes. The budget has a hole in it. If I don’t find an alternative water source—”

“You can’t fix the creek by not sleeping.”

I opened my mouth.

He waited.

I closed it.

The creek ran outside. Thin. The sound of it had become the sound of the thing I couldn’t solve, and it ran through the silence between us, and I sat in the chair with my wrapped wrist against my leg and my phone in my pocket and the agreement on the table between us, and I had nothing.

“You come first,” Cash said.

Three words. He said them the way he’d said them in the field — you’re not done yet — with the quiet certainty of a man who had decided something and wasn’t asking permission for the decision.

“Before the budget. Before the event. Before the creek, before August, before the certificate, before the water, before any of it.” His eyes held mine. Green. Steady. “You come first. Always. That’s what I signed. That’s what you signed. You wrote the rules, Priya. I’m asking whether you still mean them.”

I looked at the agreement. My handwriting. His. The two sheets that held everything we’d decided on a morning when I’d had nine hours of sleep and a full breakfast and the clarity that came from being rested enough to know what I needed.

“I mean them,” I said.

“Then I need to hear you say yes to what comes next.”

My throat worked.

“The consequences clause,” he said. “We agreed they’d be decided ahead of time. We agreed they’d be something you chose. We agreed no taking away sleep or meals. We agreed a short, quiet break. No work, no screens.” He paused. “We also agreed that if you knowingly broke a rule, we’d decide what happened before it ever occurred. You broke every rule on this page for three days. You knew you were breaking them. You told me so yourself, the night we signed — you said you’d know.”

“I said I’d know.”

“And you did.”

“Yes.”

“I’m asking whether you still consent to the arrangement. All of it. Including consequences for breaking the rules you wrote.”

The lamp hummed. The creek ran. My wrist ached under the bandage, a low, steady pulse that had been with me all day, the body’s patient insistence that something had been damaged and needed attention.

I looked at Cash. His face was open. Not angry. Not disappointed. Not enjoying this. The face of a man doing something he’d promised to do, carefully, because he’d said he would and because the woman across the table needed him to.

“Yes,” I said. “I consent.”

He held my gaze for a long moment. Whatever he found there — and I could feel my own face, the exhaustion and the fear and the thing underneath both that I didn’t have a name for — he accepted it.