I Need a Wife by Tomorrow
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2
Lili
I told Cassidy everything the same night Calder rode home with my half-answer trailing behind him like dust off his wagon wheels. I didn’t wait until morning. Some decisions curdle if you let them sit too long in the dark, and I wanted this one settled while my nerve still held.
She was upstairs when I climbed the back steps, sitting on the edge of her bed with her hair loose and a letter from home half-finished on her lap, the kind she wrote every few weeks and rarely sent, since there was no longer anyone at that Ohio address she trusted to read it kindly. She looked up when I came in, and whatever she saw in my face made her set the letter aside before I’d said a word.
I didn’t dress it up. I told her about the judge’s letter, about Emmie, about the man who’d stood in my doorway with his hat in his hands and asked me to marry him on a court’s timeline. I told her I meant to say yes. And then I told her why I’d come to find her before I gave Calder my answer.
“The store is yours, if you want it,” I said. “Not given. Sold. I won’t hand you a debt with no shape to it and call that a kindness.”
She stared at me the way a person stares at a door they didn’t know was there. “I don’t have money, LilLi. You know I don’t.”
“I’m not asking for money today.” I sat beside her on the bed, and for a moment neither of us spoke, and I let the silence do what silence sometimes does better than words. “Half of everything the store earns comes to me, until the store itself is paid for. You keep the other half, and you keep the roof over it, and the name on the deed becomes yours the day the debt is settled. Whatever Calder’s household buys from those shelves, flour, cloth, nails, whatever it is, comes off what you owe me instead of passing through your hand as coin. It shortens the road for you a little, every time we buy something. That’s fair to both of us, I think.”
I watched the arithmetic move behind her eyes, watched her turn the offer over from every side the way a person does when they’ve been disappointed once already and have learned not to trust a good thing until they’ve found its edges. “Half the profit, every month, until it’s paid,” she said slowly, “and it’s mine outright, the day it’s paid off. And whatever you and Calder spend here comes straight off what I owe.”
“That’s the whole of it.”
“Why?” she asked, and there was no suspicion in it, only a kind of disbelief that made my chest ache a little on her behalf. “You could sell to anyone. Silas Rourke would buy it outright and hand you the money in a week.”
“I know what Rourke would do with it,” I said, and didn’t need to say more than that, because we’d both watched him circle Calder’s land for two years like a buzzard too patient to hurry. “I’d rather see it in the hands of someone who’ll still be sweeping that same boardwalk in twenty years, arguing with the flour delivery same as I always have. You found me on a train platform with your whole life in one trunk, and you never once complained about the cot in the back room, or the hours, or the fact that half the town still looks at you sideways for taking work instead of a husband. You’ve earned a life here as much as I ever built one.”
She cried a little then, quietly, the way people cry when relief and grief arrive together and can’t be told apart. I let her. When she’d settled, we talked through the rest of it, plain and practical, because a friendship built on kindness alone doesn’t keep a roof from leaking, and I wanted this to be something sturdier than a favor between us. We agreed she’d keep her own books alongside mine until the first year closed, so there’d be no argument later about what was owed and what was already paid. We agreed I’d still come by once a week, not to watch over her shoulder, but because I found I wasn’t ready to let the store go from my life entirely, only from my daily hands.
We sat up a good while longer than either of us intended, working through the smaller questions that only occur to a person once the larger one has been settled. What would happen to the ledgers Tian had kept in his own hand, going back to the year the store first opened — I told her to keep them on the shelf where they’d always sat, since a business ought to remember where it came from, even under a new name. What would she do about the room above the store where she’d slept since the night I found her, now that it would be hers outright rather than borrowed — she said she thought she might finally hang the curtains she’d been meaning to sew since spring, now that the walls felt like they belonged to her. Small things. But it was in the small things, I think, that the whole shape of what we were doing became real to both of us, more than it had in the signing of any paper.
By the time I rose to leave, the candle had burned low and my back ached from sitting so long on the edge of her bed, and neither of us had said anything more about fear or gratitude, because we had already said what needed saying, and the rest could simply be lived.
We went to the land office together the next morning before the heat set in, Cassidy in her good dress with her hair pinned the careful way she wore it for anything that felt like an occasion, and the land agent, a thin, unhurried man named Whitfield who’d witnessed enough of Dry Creek’s business to have stopped being surprised by any of it, drew up the papers while we sat across from him at his narrow desk.
He asked, before he wrote a word of it down, whether we understood what we were entering into, in the flat, dutiful tone of a man who’d asked the same question of a hundred other transactions and expected the same nodding answer he always got. I told him we did. He looked between the two of us for a long moment, an older widow and a girl not yet twenty, and something in his face softened just slightly, though he didn’t remark on it, only dipped his pen and began to write.
He read the terms back to us plainly. Half the profits to LilLi Chen, formerly LilLi Zhao, widow, until the purchase price is satisfied in full. Purchases made on account by the household of Calder Vance to be credited directly against the balance owed. Full title to pass to Cassidy Williams upon final payment. He read it twice through, slow enough that neither of us could claim later we hadn’t understood a word of it, and I found myself grateful for his carefulness, though I suspected it came less from kindness than from long habit — a man who’d seen enough disputed deeds in his years behind that desk to know that clarity now saved a great deal of grief later.
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