Total pages in book: 136
Estimated words: 135847 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 679(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 453(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135847 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 679(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 453(@300wpm)
I walked into the office and the first thing I saw was Zoey beaming.
The second thing I saw was an extraordinary bouquet of pink sweetheart roses, pink carnations and pale-yellow floribunda roses sitting on the corner of my desk.
The Hale interview was dropping that evening at six o’clock eastern time.
And I hadn’t been wrong, except that no one had yet seen it, and still, it was going to be even bigger than I expected.
Excitement was at a fever pitch. My agent was turning down requests left and right for an advanced look at the interview. New offers were being hinted, including adding me to the cast of prominent women’s chat shows and even giving me slots on network morning programs. And needless to say, she was sharing that the numbers of the current offers that we were negotiating needed to be reconsidered, and no one was balking.
I figured the flowers were from my dad (and mom). Communication had been strained since Hale and I left their house. I hadn’t heard word one from my brother, but I hadn’t really connected with Mom and/or Dad because I’d been busy with the move, work and promoting this interview.
I hit my office and picked up the note that came with the flowers which was resting at the base of the vase on my desk.
“I’m sorry, I looked. I probably shouldn’t have. They were just so gorgeous, I had to know who sent them,” Zoey, who’d come to stand in the door of my office, said.
I glanced over my shoulder at her. She was still beaming.
I opened up the card.
It read,
You’re going to knock them dead.
-Hale
A shiver swept over my skin.
Oh God.
“He’s pure class,” Zoey noted in as dreamy a tone as a girl from the Bronx could utter.
“Hmm,” I replied.
“I gotta run out and get stuff for tonight. I’ll see you in a couple of hours,” she went on.
“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 day I 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.
Nugget of news: this was one of three ways we could get into the new, double-paned, heavy-duty security door. We could also enter a code or use a key.