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“He took away the happy,” I whisper back. Tessa doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t tell me he was an asshole or everything will be okay. All she does is hold me.
Tears roll down my cheeks, but I can’t really cry. I feel too hollow for that. There aren’t any sobs inside me, and though I know they’ll come soon enough, for now, I just feel this emptiness where happiness was when I woke up.
“Tell me what happened,” Tessa says as she pulls me into my oversized chair. I sit down, but I can’t manage to lie down. I can’t be bothered to be comfortable right now.
The words get stuck in my throat, and all I can do is pull the envelope from my purse and hand it to her. I look across the room as she rifles through it, staring at the coffee pot, but seeing Em standing there cooking pancakes and eggs for us. Dressed in his suit, just like always.
That damned smile on his face. The smile that I fell in love with after I hated it. The liar’s smile that fooled me until the very end.
And those deep green eyes that burned into me. The way he held a world of emotions back behind them.
I can’t stop seeing him there, and as the seconds tick by, I realize that I’m not even angry at him for convincing me he wasn’t lying. It’s that he convinced me I could be more, that I could be blissful when all I’d ever known was fine.
And then he ripped it away.
Now, I know what perfect is, but I know I don’t get to have it. It’s like learning to fly and having your wings cut from your back.
“Are you sure this is him?” Tessa asks as she holds up the photo.
I nod. “It’s his suit. The woman is who he went to the movie premier with on Sunday.”
She frowns, but then she slides the photo back into the envelope. “Have you talked to him?”
I shake my head, struggling with words still. I can’t stop seeing him in the apartment. The memory of that morning is so vivid. The way he came to sit with Tessa and me and joked about late night screams.
I want to reach out and touch the image my mind’s creating, to go back to a morning where I was that happy instead of the reality I’m in right now. I want to have a few more moments with the man I remember instead of the man I know.
All I have left are ghosts of the past, and I wonder how long they’ll haunt me. Is it bad that I hope they won’t ever leave?
“Are you going to keep working at Aspire?” she asks.
That’s what finally brings me out of my fantasies. “No. I texted him that I quit.”
She’s quiet for a few minutes and just stares at me. I know what she’s thinking.What are you going to do then?
“I got another offer yesterday that’s nearly as good of pay. I might take that, or I might do some job hunting. In a worst-case scenario, I can always fall back on my ChitChat money.”
Tessa nods. Then she frowns. “Wait, you got an offer from another company? Have you been applying for jobs?”
I know I should be listening to her and paying attention to her questions. It’s just hard to think about what she’s saying when I’m trying to deal with the hollowness that I’m feeling.
“No. It was just an offer in my personal email.”
She takes a deep breath and lets it out in a huff. “Didn’t Emery tell you he never brought any other women home? Even before you? Why would he start now? And who took that picture? Madison, it sounds really sketchy. Throw in the job offer out of the blue, and I don’t know…”
Her words snap me back into the here and now. “What are you saying? You don’t think he cheated on me?”
Tessa holds out her hands. “I’m not saying anything concrete. All I can say for sure is that it sounds really weird with way too many unanswered questions. I’m sorry, but it’s my job now to pick up on these kinds of things. If you’re really the hot commodity that you said you were on Saturday, then there’s a real possibility of someone fabricating this photo just to make you have a reason to quit. You’re playing in a billionaire’s world, and if you’re the newest money maker out there, people will do some really shady shit to get you.”
Is that possible? Could someone really be trying to sabotage me and Em just to make me leave Aspire?
“Can you tell for sure?” I ask, and the tears begin to dry on my cheeks.
She shakes her head. “No. With a digital file, I think we could, but not with this. I’m sure that whoever did it was a pro, and it’s already a little blurry, so it’d be tough to get a definitive answer.”
She puts the envelope down on the couch and sits down next to me on the oversized chair. When she wraps her arm around my shoulder, she says, “You might think about talking to Emery. You’re good at reading people. Maybe you can figure out if he’s telling the truth or not.”
I nod my head. It’s the last thing I want, but I need to know for sure. It should matter to me if it’s all a lie, but at the same time, am I really that surprised? Em refused to let us be a real couple.
