My hand goes to my nose. “What thing?”
“That thing! The red splotchy thing!” She leans closer to her camera. “Spill. What happened?”
“Julian told me about his exes.”
Silence. Then: “His exes. Plural.”
“Three of them. It was... a lot.”
“A lot how? Like, ‘I have baggage’ a lot? Or ‘I murdered them and buried them in my backyard’ a lot?”
I almost laugh. Almost. “Somewhere in between, I guess. They’re all dead, Sage.”
“Dead.”
“Dead. And for a long time, Julian blamed himself. Thought that loving him was dangerous. Cursed, maybe. Like anyone who got close to him was doomed.”
“Oh, honey.”
I grab the phone and sit on the edge of the tub with the phone balanced on my knee.
“But it wasn’t him,” I continue. “There’s this guy from his past. Someone who blames Julian for something that happened years ago. And he’s been targeting people Julian cares about. To hurt him.”
“Targeting how?”
“Sage.”
“No, seriously, Poppy. Targeting how? Are you safe? Is this guy at the wedding?”
“He’s here,” I admit. “But Julian has people. Security. We’re handling it.”
“Handling it.” Her voice goes flat. “You’re at your sister’s destination wedding with a mysterious billionaire whose exes are all dead and a stalker who sounds like he’s been killing people for years, and you’re ‘handling it.’”
When she puts it like that, it does sound insane.
“Yes.”
“Poppyyyyyyyy.”
“I know how it sounds. I do. But Sage, I’m not in danger from Julian. I’m in danger because of Julian. Because someone wants to hurt him by hurting people he loves. And I’m one of those people now.”
“Now?” Her voice sharpens. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“He loves me, Sage. And I...” I take a breath. “I love him, too. It’s terrifying. Probably stupid. And definitely not what either of us signed up for when I hired a fake boyfriend for a wedding.”
I think about Julian’s face when he told me about the women he’d lost. The way his voice cracked on their names. The certainty in his eyes that I would run—and the wonder when I didn’t.
“Do you? Really?”
“Yes,” I say. “I really do.”
Sage goes quiet. I watch her thinking—weighing concern against trust, fear against friendship. We’ve been doing this dance since freshman year of college, when she talked me out of dating that guy with the “live laugh love” tattoo and I talked her out of dropping out to follow a band on tour.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay?”
“Okay. I trust you. I don’t understand what’s happening, and I’m definitely going to need the full story when you get home, and I reserve the right to fly down there and cause a scene if you stop answering my texts. But okay.”
