“All the more reason to set my DVR,” she muttered with a dark look to Troy.
“Jiamin, why not talk to him? He clearly worships you, and you had to know he’d be here when you came back. Why go through this unless you wanted to see him?”
Her eyes drifted to the ceiling, then back to me with a deep inhale, as if flinging herself into a flood with no choice. “I’ll be blunt. I can’t have children. I can’t carry them to term.”
“I’m… I’m sorry,” I stammered, totally unmoored now.
“You’re the only one here who understands wanting a kid and being unable to have one.”
“Still, you must know you have options.”
“And I’ve investigated them. Do you know what I learned? This is the one thing my parents won’t pay for. They can’t comprehend surrogacy, let aloneadoption,” she ever-so-slightly sneered. “A single daughter with a fatherless child. Not what they dreamed on their wedding day. Apparently I’m irresponsible to subject a child to ‘such a life.’”
“That’s impossibly unfair,” I said quietly.
“So I brokered a $100,000 bonus in my contract if I made it halfwaythrough the season. Now I’ll go home and move forward, however I want.”
I nodded, impressed. “Good for you. You’ll be a wonderful mother.”
She gave me the first true, unrestrained smile I’d ever seen from her. “Thank you.”
“Are you telling PB any of this before you go?”
Her smile retreated behind the clouds as quickly as it had emerged. “In January, the day after New Year’s, he wrote me an email, the first I’d heard from him in two years. He said he still loved me and wanted to make things right. So I had to admit a problematic truth to myself. Even though he’d messed up colossally… it had allbeenfor me, hadn’t it?” she said, nervous fingers brushing her hair behind her ears. “I met him in Bryant Park and told him to stop competing on the show if he wanted me back. Forever. He agreed, and I’m not sure we went a day without seeing each other after that. We even flew back to Illinois to visit his parents, and it all felt… possible again. Then two months later, I overheard him on the phone withthis one”—she gestured to Troy—“negotiating deal terms for this season.”
She swallowed, voice breaking. “Because he can’t quit. No matter how much he claims to love me, hehasto rule this kingdom of dirt. That might be the one thing Vanessa and I will ever agree on. PB will never leave this game. So I left him.”
“I’m so sorry, Jiamin.”
“It’s just the reality.” She shrugged. “Anyway, then I learned about my fertility issues—”
“Wait, youjustfound out about that?”
“Two weeks before filming, so I rang Troy to make me an offer for a swan song.”
I gazed at her in awe. “How are you even functioning right now?”
“How areyou? We’ve both had an eventful few months,” she replied, her smile tight. “Look, I’m quitting no matter what, but I need everyone to vote me in… so I can select PB to go against me.” My stomach droppedat the prospect of him learning this.
“If he lets me win, we’ll leave here together and maybe see if something between us is still possible. But if he chooses to beat me and stay, then he’ll never see me again,” she concluded, officially the world’s most elegant hijacker.
“You want him to quit or send you home?” I asked, all the various schemes I’d heard in the last hour spinning in my mind. “Jiamin, you can’t honestly think you’ll get what you want by manipulating him?”
She scooted her chair back, totally unfazed. “I had a feeling you’d say that.”
I grasped then my vote hadn’t been her real goal. “You only told me so I’d warn him?”
“Better he hears it from you. You actuallyarethe first friend he’s had in a long time.”
“Jiamin?” I stopped her as she stood to go. “Whatever he decides, try not to let it change the memory of how you felt in the past. Once that’s gone, you won’t get it back, trust me.”
With a resigned sigh, she lightly touched my shoulder and left me at the table. I was surprised by her validation (plus how much it meant to me) and prayed it wasn’t too late for her and PB. Thinking of them then,rootingfor them, I found myself involuntarily missing Barnes for the first time in weeks. Before I’d left for Italy, there’d been a moment every day when I couldn’t sustain my rage. It was always in the spare minutes after 5:50 a.m. when I would snooze my alarm. I’d wake up, his side of the bed untouched in the night as if protected by a circle of salt, my body still unconsciously making room for him beside me. I would imagine him asleep, curled there like a cat, one hand beneath his pillow, the other balled in a fist under his chin. That was when I grieved my husband. I missed those rare moments of his silence, when he was unaware, unthinking, those moments when he was mine, in the intimacy of ourbed, both of us convinced—for better or worse—we were dreaming the same dream. And living it too.
Rain grazed the windows as I entered the penthouse gym, hunting PB but only finding Shawn and Imogen. “What was the big secret?” Shawn called from the treadmill.
“And why do you look paler than usual?” Imogen asked.
Before I could respond, Melange shuffled in from her confessional taping, the oversized silk train of her lilac imperial gown bunching around her bare feet. Topping off her ensemble was a highlighter-pink wig, its taut bun pinned by sparkling chopsticks. “Good Lord, why didn’t you just dress up like a fortune cookie and do a musical number?” Imogen sighed.
