“If I could go back, I would’ve given Emma my number the day we met. Swear I would’ve. But when I heard the paparazzi were on the way, I knew I needed to get out before they spotted me with her. If I was the news, all by myself, for the disaster that was my divorce, they’d leave her alone. If we were in the news together—”
I shake my head and look at Theo. “You were there. You were at the wedding. She didn’t look much better when I crashed her porch in Fiji. No chance in hell I was making it worse for her.”
He’s scowling.
Grey’s frowning, but it looks more like he’s thinking about something.
Andnothow fast he’ll have to move to keep Theo from ending me.
I’ve heard about the get-out-of-jail-free pass.
Also pretty sure it wouldn’t extend to him murdering me.
But only pretty sure.
And that might depend on how much the sheriff likes my old Razzle Dazzle films. Or my podcast.
If she’s not even the tiniest bit of a fan, I could actually be fucked.
“Why didn’t you answer any of her emails?” Grey asks.
Maybe it’s the heat finally dying down in my mouth. Maybe it’s the fact that they haven’t tried to feed me to a bear or a moose. Maybe it’s just getting my story off my chest.
But I’m starting to relax. “My team was fielding about three hundred emails a day with women offering to have my baby or claiming to be carrying my secret love child since the news was reporting I wanted to be a father so badly I’d fuck up my marriage for it.”
“Three hundred?” Grey says.
I giggle.
Giggle?
Yeah.
Giggle.
Weird. “Yeah. At least. The IT team at Razzle Dazzle did some woowoo magic IT thing, and they said we were getting hit with targeted AI spam bots who were taking advantage of the keywords in the stories about my divorce and hoping I’d think one or two were real enough to convince me to send child support.”
“And how many could’ve been real?” Theo asks.
I giggle again.Shit. What the fuck? “None. I mean, Emma. But otherwise, none.”
“You sure about that?”
I nod.Emphatically. And it makes my brains catch fire a little too, on top of going a little sloshy.
The elevation is making me drunk.
On straight kombucha.
Weird.
“Why didn’t you tell them to watch for emails from Emma?” Grey asks.
“I was the dick who didn’t saybye-ee.” I toast them with my kombucha can, which is a weird-ass thing to do, but it feels right. And then I guzzle the rest of this second—no,thirdcan too. I had one while they were cooking. “She didn’t want to hear frommeeee.”
Theo sets his trash on a folding table, tops it with a rock, and then settles back in his chair again, hands folded over his stomach. “Tell us the rest of the story but sing it.”
“Like Ryan Reynolds,” Grey adds. “My sources tell me you do a killer impression.
