The world, for Dr. Alistair Finch, was best viewed through a fine layer of dust. It softened the harsh edges of the present and smelled comfortingly of the past.
Dust motes danced like constellations in the single beam of afternoon sun that pierced the gloom of his university office, illuminating the precarious ziggurats of books threatening to avalanche from every surface.
His desk was a topographical map of his own mind: ridges of leather-bound tomes, valleys of scattered research papers, and a lone, fossilized mug from which the last dregs of tea had evaporated sometime during the fall of the Visigoths.
He was, at this moment, perfectly content. The silence was broken only by the gentle crinkle of parchment as he leaned closer to a facsimile of a 14th-century land grant, his fingers tracing the ghost of a wax seal.
The script was a beautiful, looping mess, a puzzle of Latin legalese that made his heart beat a little faster.
This was his language. Not the ambiguous minefield of small talk at faculty mixers, but the clear, unyielding text of history.
Here, things were certain. Here, he was fluent.
A sharp, authoritative rap on his office door shattered the tranquility. Alistair flinched, the sound as jarring as a fire alarm in a monastery.
He considered ignoring it. Most intrusions were from students with flimsy excuses or colleagues attempting to lure him into discussions about departmental funding, a topic he found uniquely soul-crushing.
The rap came again, louder this time. With a sigh that disturbed a decade of dust on a stack of journals, he pushed his chair back.
“Enter,” he called out, his voice raspy from disuse.
The door opened to reveal not a student, but a man in a suit so sharp it looked like it could cut paper.
He held a crisp, aggressively white envelope. “Dr. Alistair Finch?” the man asked, his tone brisk and impersonal.
“I am,” Alistair confirmed, squinting as if the man’s polished shoes were emitting their own light source.
“Delivery for you.” The man stepped forward, placed the envelope on the only clear four-inch square of Alistair’s desk, and retreated with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine.
The door clicked shut, leaving the silence to rush back in, now heavier and tinged with unease.
The envelope lay there like an artifact from another planet. It bore the embossed insignia of a prestigious law firm: “Pembroke, Hayes, & Associates.”
He recognized the name. They were his grandmother’s lawyers.
Matilda Finch did nothing by half-measures, and that included her choice of legal representation.
He picked it up. The cardstock was thick, formal, and cold.
With a growing sense of foreboding, he slid a letter opener—a miniature replica of a Roman gladius—under the flap and sliced it open.
The letter inside was just as imposing. The language was a dense forest of legalese, clauses, and sub-clauses.
His eyes scanned the familiar phrases: “Last Will and Testament,” “Estate of Matilda Finch,” “primary beneficiary.” He felt a familiar knot of grief tighten in his chest, still raw despite the months since her passing.
Matilda had been a force of nature, a woman as formidable and enduring as the granite edifice of the family home.
He pressed on, his academic mind automatically dissecting the syntax as he read. The main thrust was expected.
Matilda had left the bulk of her considerable fortune in a trust. His trust. A wave of profound, dizzying relief washed over him.
He thought of the Blackwood Library. Not the university’s sterile, fluorescent-lit facility, but the private library his great-grandfather had built—a magnificent, two-story cathedral of books that now stood on the edge of ruin.
His library. The place where he had spent every summer of his childhood, breathing in the scent of aging vellum and lemon polish.
Now, its roof leaked with a determined malice, water stains blooming like ghostly fungi on the frescoed ceiling. The intricate mahogany shelves were beginning to warp, and a recent appraisal had warned of irreversible damage to the rarest manuscripts from the damp.
The library needed more than a patch job; it needed a savior. And this trust—this was it.
This was the salvation he had been praying for.
His eyes raced down the page, his mind already allocating funds, picturing the restorers, the climate-control systems, the archival-grade materials.
He could save it. He could preserve every last crumbling page.
And then he saw it. A single, indented paragraph that stopped his heart cold.
“…it is with the deepest consideration for his future happiness and the continuation of the Finch family legacy that the disbursement of the aforementioned trust is contingent upon a single stipulation.
At the time of execution, the primary beneficiary, Dr. Alistair Finch, must be demonstrably engaged in a stable, committed, and legally recognized romantic partnership (i.e., marriage or formal betrothal) for a period of no less than six months.”
Alistair read the sentence again. And a third time.
The words refused to arrange themselves into any logical sequence.
Stable? Committed? A partnership?
It was as if the document had suddenly lapsed into an ancient, indecipherable tongue. A low, humming sound started in his ears.
He sank into his chair, the letter trembling in his hand. This was a joke.
A cruel, posthumous prank from a woman who had always lamented his “scholarly monasticism.” She couldn’t be serious.
He looked around his office, his sanctuary, which suddenly felt like a cage of his own making. The towers of books seemed to lean in, mocking him.
He had dedicated his life to the dead, and his grandmother had, from beyond the grave, sentenced him to the terrifying realm of the living.
Panic, cold and sharp, began to prickle at the base of his neck. A romantic partnership.
The phrase itself sounded alien. His last attempt at dating had been a catastrophic faculty mixer three years ago where he had tried to initiate conversation with a visiting literature professor by comparing the structural integrity of her argument to that of a Carolingian aqueduct.
She had stared at him, blinked slowly, and then walked away to get more cheese.
He was fluent in five languages, four of them dead. He could spend twelve hours straight deciphering Hittite trade agreements without a break.
But the nuanced, subtext-laden, emotionally volatile language of modern courtship? He might as well be trying to read smoke signals in a hurricane.
His gaze fell on a framed, faded photograph on his bookshelf. It was the Blackwood Library in its prime, sunlight streaming through the great arched windows, glinting off the gilded spines of thousands of books.
He could almost smell the leather and old paper, feel the profound peace of its silent company. That was his passion.
That was his love. And Matilda had just chained its survival to the one thing in the world he was least equipped to acquire.
His mind, a machine honed for analysis and problem-solving, began to whir, desperately trying to find a loophole.
He scanned the clause again. “Demonstrably engaged.” “Stable, committed.” “Legally recognized.”
The language was ironclad. Matilda’s lawyers were the best for a reason.
There was no ambiguity.
He stood up and began to pace the narrow channel between his desk and the wall, the frantic energy too much to contain.
Real dating was out of the question. It was inefficient.
The timeline was impossible. The potential for rejection, misunderstanding, and sheer, debilitating awkwardness was statistically near one hundred percent.
The process of finding a compatible human being, building a rapport, and escalating it to a state of “formal betrothal” in a matter of months was a task of Herculean proportions.
It was illogical. Unfeasible.
He stopped, his hand resting on a heavy volume titled *Byzantine Commercial Law*. The spine was cool and solid beneath his palm. Law. Contracts. Agreements.
An idea, utterly insane and yet perfectly logical, began to form in the quiet recesses of his panicked mind.
The problem, he reasoned, was emotional. Matilda wanted him to experience a relationship.
But the requirement, as written, was procedural. It was about demonstration, about a legally sound status.
The will didn’t stipulate love. It didn’t mention affection, or chemistry, or any of the other chaotic, unquantifiable variables that made human connection so terrifying.
It stipulated a partnership.
What was a partnership if not a contract? An agreement between two parties for mutual benefit.
He would not subject himself to the whims of romance. He would not bumble his way through a series of excruciating social encounters.
He would solve an emotional problem with a logical framework. He would approach this not as a suitor, but as an employer.
He would hire a professional. He would draft a contract, with clear terms, a defined timeline, and specific deliverables.
He needed a fiancée, but he would procure one through a transaction, not through courtship.
A strange calm settled over him, the panic receding as the sheer, academic audacity of his plan took root. It was a loophole, not in the legal text, but in its emotional spirit. It was a strategy Matilda, in all her shrewdness, would likely never have anticipated.
Alistair sat back down at his desk, the ancient land grant forgotten. He pulled a clean sheet of paper from a drawer, the white surface a stark contrast to the cluttered desk.
He picked up a pen. At the top of the page, he wrote:
Project Blackwood: Partner Acquisition.
He underlined it twice. He would save his library.
He would fulfill the terms of the will. And he would do it the only way he knew how: by turning the most emotional of human endeavors into a meticulously planned, contractually obligated, and entirely passionless enterprise.