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“See you.”
She took off.
I shrugged off my coat, sat behind my desk, thought on it, and came to the conclusion that, if he could be the bigger person, I could meet him there.
And if this was a peace offering, well…
We’d see.
So I texted,Thanks for the flowers. They’re gorgeous.
It would take hours.
In fact, it was after we dropped the show and views and likes were skyrocketing, as were follows. It was when me and Chuck and his wife Karen and Zoey and her boyfriend Pug and Carole and Felicity and my downstairs neighbor Yolanda (who was also a good friend) and a dozen other people who I loved, including Mom and Dad (and also Emilie and Scott) were milling about the spent streamers, drinking champagne and eating shrimp cocktail and baked camembert that Hale texted back.
Thank Brandi.
That was it. That was the entirety of his text.
The flowers weren’t from Hale, they were from his assistant.
“Go to hell,” I whispered to my phone.
Then I poured myself more champagne and downed half the glass to clear the shitty taste out of my mouth.
* * *
Three weeks later…
The dayI signed a contract to produce and conduct eight episodes of a talk show on a massively popular streaming service…
Which was the day I signed Luna Bevin to talk frankly about her ordeal of being a survivor of sexual assault at the hands of Andrew Winston…
Which was further the day I signed on to do a weekly ten-minute celebrity interview for a network morning program, this interview to be filmed in my current suite, which that day I’d also signed a year lease to keep in order to conduct those interviews, along with producing continued Elsa’s Exchanges.
This was the day when Geraldine sent more photos of Hale and Blake Sharp.
They’d been taken the afternoon before. They were walking in Central Park. He was wearing a light gray turtleneck, a camelhair overcoat, jeans, sneakers and a navy slouchy beanie. She was wearing silvery-white cashmere joggers, a matching sweater, and a long, black, ribbed, oversize duster with a pair of stylish, low-heeled booties. A white beret was on her head.
They were walking close together, heads bowed, both of them looking at something on Hale’s phone that he was holding up in front of them.
He was in the city.
This was the best day of my life, and the man who helped me get there was in town, looking gorgeous and hanging out with a raven-haired beauty who was not me.
I wished I could say that as the days wore on, and our fake-not-fake date faded deeper into the past, the promise of our time on the bench and that kiss unfulfilled hurt less.
But it didn’t.
* * *
Seven weeks later…
It happened.
It surprised me when it happened, and why, but I couldn’t stop it from happening.
I’d walked into my apartment building, the door opening because the new security system scanned my face to let me in.
