Page 53 of Her Billion Dollar Groom

Swallowing a sigh, I hold my phone up by the screen of my computer, so it looks like I’m still listening to whatever my marketing team is droning on about.

Heyyyy,says the first message.

Then she sends several incomprehensible emojis, including a kissy face and a blushing smile. Finally she gets down to whatshe actually wants.Red carpet event tonight. Lots of press. I’ll text you the address.

Then she sends several more random emojis. I’ll never understand them.

Again, I suppress a sigh. There are worse ways I could spend my night, but there are also many, many things I would rather do than go to some dumb awards show.

She’s right that we should go, though. Even though we barely speak, even though we’re not living together, so much of what we’re doing relies on the idea of me and Eliza living our little fairy tale. It doesn’t matter how true that actually is, it’s what people are expecting to see.

We should go to events together. We should smile and perform in front of the cameras like monkeys in a cage.

We should pretend that our life is perfect, that a romance like ours could never possibly go wrong.

And I do want to see her…

“Earth to Jason,” says my head of marketing, snapping me out of my reverie. “Come in, Jason. Can you hear us?”

“Sorry, Sal,” I grimace, embarrassed that I let my thoughts drift away too far. “I was miles away.”

“We wanted some input before we move on, that’s all.”

“Great, yeah.” I chuckle, shoving my glasses up to the bridge of my nose. “Remind me what we were talking about?”

The meeting seems to last an eternity, and the second it’s over, I pick my phone up and read Eliza’s message again. Reading her words, you’d think it was like we hadn’t fallen out at all. Iknow it’s just the way she is, but I would have expected her to be angrier with me, bitter for turfing her out. But if she is, she’s hiding it unbelievably well.

Or maybe it really is only me who has a broken heart over us.

She always was a good actor.

I want to see her, but every time we do something like this, it gets harder. Every time I have to force a smile, or she kisses me on the cheek because that’s what we’re supposed to do, it makes my heart break a bit more. I can’t keep doing this.

Sorry, I text back.Got to work late. Maybe next time.

She sends back a simple thumbs-up and hours blur past. I don’t even notice when the event I should have been going to starts. I’ve been working on copying over a mountain of data from spreadsheets all day. And every time I think I’m getting close to being done, I open a new page and am hit with another wave of sums and charts.

Everyone was confused when I asked to do this.It’s busy work, they said,we can get one of the interns to do it. But I insisted. It might be beneath me to do something like this, or not be what’s expected from someone in my position, but hours and hours of busy work seem like just the thing I need right now.

Besides, it sets a good example. If I’m willing to do this kind of work, then nobody can complain when they get assigned it.

At about nine o’clock, Chris calls me into an important emergency meeting. With a sigh, I accept the call. “What’s happened?” I ask, hoping he’s going to get straight to the point.

“Jason, it’s late,” is his opener.

“Whathappened?” I ask again, forcing myself to keep breathing.

“It’s the deal with Lemon,” he says, and my heart sinks.

“They’re backing out of the merger, aren’t they?” I groan.

“Not backing out exactly, but they don’t like the terms. They don’t like the terms so much that they’re insisting they need them all changed before the deadline. And they just told us that today, about twenty minutes ago, actually.”

I draw in a long, deep breath. This long night just got even longer. “What do they want? And when do they want a response from us?”

“Tomorrow. Tomorrow, midday.”

“Tomorrow? Oh, God. I knew signing with them would be a bad idea. Those guys have caused us nothing but trouble since we started trying to be involved with them.”

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