Page 60 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

I balk. “Hardly.”

“Did somebody slip you a bad cookie?” she asks. “Did somebody have a traumatizing cookie experience?” She pauses, and then, “Never mind. I’m sorry.”

Something in my chest deflates, because I know exactly what just happened here, exactly why she retreated. When you Google me, the top few results are magazine features that make much ado of my past. The boy whose parents died in a car crash when he was just fifteen. Sister adopted without him. In and out of foster care, all alone in the world, nobody can reach him. He invents the solution that would’ve saved his mother’s life, but he can never bring her back. Such bullshit. “Just don’t,” I say.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t do what you just did. Assume that my dislike of cookies is because of a tragedy that happened half a lifetime ago. Apparently there can’t be an article written about me without some armchair psychologist weaving that narrative about my never quite recovering from that. As if it drives everything I do. It’s ignorant…”

“Well, youdidinvent the one thing that might’ve saved her.”

“Yes, maybe it would’ve saved her, who knows, but this bullshit story that I heroically dedicate my life to Vossameer to spare others the pain and so forth…it’s simply not accurate. I promise you. It’s not how it was, and it’s not how it is now.”

“Okay.”

“It’s fucking annoying,” I bite out.

“Sorry.”

I suck in a breath. I’ve come on too strong, and I can feel her withdrawing. I’d kill to be able to reach out to her, grab her, pull her to me, make her stay. The world is full of people to do my bidding, but not the wake-up-call girl. Never the wake-up-call girl.

In desperation, I give her something—the only thing I can. The truth.

“When people say that about me, when they go on like that, it makes me feel…alone.” My blood races with the strangeness of saying it aloud after all these years. It’s not something I ever told anybody. Not even my sister.

It feels…liberating.

“Makes you feel alone,” she echoes solemnly. As though she’s really taking it in. Not pushing back. Not telling me I’m great.

She doesn’t flinch, this woman, and I have this sudden and exhilarating sense that I could peel back all my layers and she still wouldn’t flinch. For the first time in my life, I want that. Instead of hiding my layers, I want to show them.

“I don’t know why,” I continue in a rush. “It’s as if those fake stories that paint me to be a heroic phoenix, rising from tragedy or some such shit—it’s as if they’re about somebody else. They’re painting a picture of somebody else. And they leave me feeling alone. I want for somebody to not do that. One person.”

“Isolated,” she says. “The stories isolate you.”

“Yes, exactly.”

My heart pounds in the silence that follows. “I’ll do it,” she says. “It’s official, then. You’re no hero. Just Theo Drummond.”

I swallow. “Thank you.”

“Theo Drummond. Just some jackalope on my roster of calls.”

“Well, no need to go that far.”

“You and your innovations. Whatevs, dude.”

I smile. It feels so easy—so right—to confess things to this nameless, faceless woman.

I tip my forehead to the window. “You want to know what else is messed up about it?”

“What?” she asks. There’s rustling in the background. Where is she? What does she see when she looks around? What does she smell like? What does she dream about?

“A little-known secret about being a so-called hero,” I say. “When you go around saying you’re not a hero, people are even more eager to call you one.”

“Heroesarenotorious for saying they’re not heroes,” she says.

“It’s like one of those finger traps that tighten the harder you try to pull out of them.”

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