Page 120 of Return Billionaire to Sender

I hate how much I loved her shy bravery. Her steadfastness. Her passion. Her loyalty. Her sense of humor.

I hate that she made me feel like I was more than what I thought. Likewewere more. Like I wasn’t alone.

I hate that she made me happy.

I’m back in my office the next day, handling all the things I should have been paying attention to while I was dealing with the Germantown Group and wasting time with Elle—or whatever her name is.

Walt strolls in at around three, fresh off the plane. He’s got packets and schedules. He’s been coordinating with the city guys. I ask him how the flight went, and he seems surprised by the question. It isn’t the kind of question I typically ask, and being that I’m in the habit of not lying to myself, I’m fully aware that I want to know if she was on the plane.

“Good,” he says. “Very smooth.”

It’s rather maddening that he doesn’t simply tell me, so I follow up my question with another seemingly casual query as to whether everybody made the flight, jokingly asking if we’d left anybody behind.

I finally get the information that I want—it seems Elle—or rather, Noelle, “Made her own way home.”

“Made her own way home?” I ask.

He shrugs; apparently that is the extent of his knowledge. So she didn’t take the company jet. As if that would make up for things.

I waste additional time imagining her doing standby, floating around the airport like a ghost, dreaming of almond croissants. Because if there’s one thing I know about her, it’s that she doesn’t think ahead when it comes to food, constantly showing up places hungry. I once saw her eat a piece of fruit out of the lobby fruit bowl. What the hell was she spending her per diem on all the time we were there? That I’d like to know.

My PR team comes in. They’re excited about these new developments. The boss of the group, a woman by the name of Wynn, is especially thrilled with the ambitious employee retention and retraining program.

“People retrain work forces all the time,” I grumble. “It’s not that much of a coup.”

“Butyounever do that,” she says. “It’s unexpectedly positive. The unexpected is always newsworthy, and accelerating a positive spin on a positive story is far easier than putting a positive spin on something outlandishly negative.”

I smile, and she gets this worried look on her face. “Not that you always have outlandishly negative things to spin.”

Just before the end of the business day, I get notice from Corman’s lawyers’ office that Bexley Partners has marked my training requirement as satisfactorily completed.

29

Noelle

I returnhome to discover that news of the accelerated eviction timeline landed well before my standby flight touched down at Kennedy.

“What happened?” Francine asks the second I walk in the door. “They took away our ninety-day move-out window. We have less than a month!”

“I am so sorry,” I say, dropping my bags. “He found out. Everything.”

“Oh my god. Was he angry? Are you in trouble?”

I wrap my arms around my middle, feeling utterly exhausted.Troubleisn’t the word.Crushedmight be more like it.Destroyed.Guilty.What have I done?

“Honey!” She comes to me and wraps me in a hug. Being that I have my arms around myself, it’s more like she’s hugging a mummy or maybe a large cocoon. “Whatever it is, we’re all in on this together,” she says, though that’s not true anymore. We’re getting dispersed like milkweed seeds in a tornado.

I mumble a mummified thanks.

“How did he find out?” she asks, letting me go.

I wince. “I had to tell him.”

“Oh, no,” she says. “What happened?”

“Well, you know, it was going really well.”

“You were getting him to watch that footage and everything,” she says.

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