“You and JP—I just can’t, still.” She starts fanning her face to keep from laugh-crying.
“Why? What about him?”
“How much do you remember about JP?”
“Nothing. I only know what I read online.”
She laughs. “Oh, girl. JP owns GoldRush.”
55Clothes, shampoo, makeup, a couple of wigs, a leather jacket. I’m not surprising myself with any medical textbooks or volumes of poetry.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
“What?” JP can’t own this place. He’s the king of chocolate! He donates to charities and good causes and…
Crystal stares at me. “Mia, for someone so smart, you are so dumb. Men like JP don’t just own a business. They have a portfolio of investments. You didn’t think he made a billion dollars off of chocolate, did you?”
I look at her, mouth agape. “Actually, I did.”
She laughs.
And why shouldn’t she? It’s comical. I was sheltering him from my reality when he was the secret money behind my abusive employer, GoldRush. I had everything so wrong. So, so wrong. I look around the room, trying to reimagine it with JP walking the floors. “Does he sit here every night in a shiny suit in his very own corner booth?”
“Nuh-uh. Never seen him here. Dude owns a lot of businesses, but his full-time focus is the chocolate company. Hehas minions who run these side hustles. He doesn’t even know about us. That’s how you scammed him.”
So that means I worked for him in a roundabout way, stole his business name and all of its advertising material, and now I’m dating him? I guess it makes sense that we were fighting in that flashback, especially if the club told him what I was up to. I can barely wrap my mind around it, so I say it out loud and slow. “Let me get this straight. He signed up for the matchmaking app and paid $35,000 to date me,” I say, “when he was already paying me to do books in this club?”
She puts her hands in the air like I’m Beyoncé belting out the lyrics to “Formation” and strutting. “You’re a genius. Straight up!”
I didn’t even take this dude to Red Lobster. Of course, if I’m following Beyoncé’s advice, he hasn’t earned that yet. Maaaaaybe later.
I look around at the club. It is literally a billionaire’s forgotten pocket change. He was in Switzerland skiing while everyone here worked two jobs and couldn’t afford to pay for childcare or get their cavities filled.56
“Girl, you worked for that rock you’re about to get. Don’t let him get away with some chippy little thing.”
I feel lightheaded. Suddenly, I flash back to a conversation I had with Max.
“You have no capacity for making decisions, especially bigdecisions,” he’d said. “Whatever you do, take it easy. Don’t do anything you can’t undo.”
I recall being offended at that statement.
“People base their decisions off their lived experience, their memories. You don’t have any right now,” he had said.
“If you haven’t noticed, I remember a lot of things,” I had responded.
“That’s true. You remember everything about everyone else. For instance, if someone proposed to one of the Kardashians, you’d be the first person I’d ask. You probably are more aware of their lived experiences and patterns of decision-making than they are.”
Max really is smart.
“One of the most vital purposes of memory is to guide decision-making,” he’d said. “It’s like they say—learn from history, or it’ll repeat itself.”
What do I do?
JP picks this moment to text. I told him I’d be home in an hour, which was almost two hours ago. I have not been the best girlfriend to this man, in so many ways.
He texts:Alone again…WRU?
