“So, what do you want me to do?” I ask, crossing my arms over my chest defensively. “Why do you care all of the sudden?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about last week. I’m talking about every time I begged you to get me off this show. Now it’s real, now you’re really losing me, and you suddenly care.”
His expression changes, the anger momentarily falling away. “I always cared,” he tells me.
“But not enough. Never enough to give up the one thing you truly love. This show.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” he says. He turns away from me, goes to sit on a bench seat in front of one of the huge portrait windows, picturesque as he thinks, his head in his hands. Seeing him that way—unguarded, if only for a moment—almost softens me.
“I don’t know why I wanted you to stay,” he finally admits, looking back up at me.
“Because you knew it was good TV if I did.”
He releases a breath.
I get up from my chair and go to him, sitting with my body facing his, one leg propped up and the other hanging off. We’re close again. “Look at me,” I say, tilting his chin up with my hand. He swallows, turning his face to me, his Adam’s apple pulsing against my fingers.
“Admit to me that you don’t want me to get engaged,” I say, leaning forward ever so slightly. “Tell me to turn him down. He’ll probably out us, but isn’t it better than the alternative?”
“What is this?” Henry asks wearily, his eyebrows knitting together. “Some sort of ultimatum?”
I keep my expression neutral. “No, Henry. It’s a simple request. Tell me you don’t want me to get engaged.”
He averts his gaze, pulling away. “Why are you doing this?”
“Why can’t you say this simple thing?” I ask him.
“Because this isn’t about me!” He’s not quite yelling, but his voice is loud enough that I flinch, standing up from my spot.
“Of course this is about you!” I yell, further escalating in a way that gives me satisfaction. “Christ, Henry, all I asked was for you to say, ‘I don’t want you to get engaged to him, Jac,’ after all this and you can’t.”
“I can,” he insists.
“You just won’t.”
“I don’t see the point. I don’t see where this ends.”
I shake my head. “You’re such a coward. You won’t do anything unless there’s three escape hatches.”
“You’re not understanding me,” he says, his tone changing, going quieter, softer. “I just need a beat to think. This isn’t going the way I thought it would go.”
“Because you can’t control us anymore!” I shout back at him, not calmed at all. “You always need a beat to put us all on the tracks you planned, but now I’m a real person making my own decisions and so is Marcus, and that doesn’t work for you.”
I make my way back to the chair I was sitting on when he arrived, curling my legs up into my chest, folding in on myself. “Maybe Marcus and I belong together because we both finally saw through your shit.”
“Jac,” he says, but even I can tell he doesn’t mean it.
“Get. Out.” I pick the magazine back up, waiting for him to protest his dismissal.
He doesn’t. He waits, probably a producer-timed two minutes to see if I’ll change my mind, say something else. When I don’t, he leaves, and I hear the door close behind him.
I’m alone.
THE DAY I’M going to get engaged starts like any other.
The sun rises to the east of a cabin in the French countryside, and I never slept anyway. I drink my coffee wrapped in a blanket, staring out the window, watching. Henry and John both show up while I’m there, like that, along with a hair and makeup team, the first since that first night in the mansion.
“You made it, Jac,” John says to me.
“Much to your consternation,” I answer without much venom.
John doesn’t disagree. “Love is a chaos agent,” he says. “I’m happy for you. Certainly makes my life easier. I love a happy ending.”
I take a long sip of coffee.
I wonder what it’s like for the other women who found themselves in this situation. Maybe the not knowing would be worse. Believing you will get proposed to and then getting dumped—or maybe realizing after the engagement that you’ve agreed to marry a stranger, so caught up in the moment that you don’t see it for what it is.
I know exactly what this is.
Then I think of Kendall, right now, likely in a château just like mine, maybe with Priya and one of the other exec producers. She’ll go first because the loser always does, so she probably started earlier than me. She’ll have watched the sun rise with a cucumber water after eight hours of sleep. She’ll be confident, one of the things I like most about Kendall, who I don’t really like at all.
I wanted to wear my red dress from the first night, something symbolic about it, but that had been shot down from the get-go.
“This isn’t a romance novel,” John says with an air of derision. Henry, much like he has all morning, doesn’t say anything.
So the dress is white, a deep V-neck down to just above my belly button, woman in red in white, even to the end.
