One-clickunfollow.
He’d bet his left nut this was the calm before the storm. These comments would move straight into vitriol territory.
There was no way that April could recover from this without some serious crisis management.
Fuuuck, she was sopping upsterileurinewith napkins on the sponsored live feed. He ran a palm over his face, a headache definitely gaining traction behind his eye sockets.
Points in her favor, though, April was very thorough with her cleanup on Aisle Two. Somehow, and he wasn’t sure how she did this, she made sopping up pee sort of charming.
Unless he was the sponsor. The sponsor wouldn’t be finding any of this charming.
And that company paid the bills.
He shook his head. Their opinion was the one that mattered.
This shopping trip needed to be very muchover. How was it not already over?
His muscles finally willing to move, Jack pushed the button on his phone—the one that called the marketing manager. “Why is this shopping trip still happening?” he asked, his blood pressure kicking against the walls of his arteries. “Kill the feed.”
The situation had definitely become asituation.
“Manually, if we have to,” he shouted.
The manager said something in reply, but he didn’t hear a word. What with all the blood rushing in his skull.
When he’d signed April right before her divorce, she’d been the epitome of tranquility. Perfection for what they’d planned together.
That was not now.
Her calm veneer had completely cracked. Confidence in herself gone. Becausethis, this right here?Thiswas not part of his plan for her. Their plan for her.
The stressed pink hue of her skin surged to red as she held the wet napkins, totally unsure of what to do with them. Yeah, he had no clue, either. The muscles in his lower back spasmed.
“Cut the camera!” he said to no one because he was alone in his office when he should’ve been in Denver. Jack should’ve flown to Colorado. He’d had a hunch after their last call that she was on the precipice of crumbling. It was in the little ways she seemed distracted. The uncertainty of her latest string of mom meditations.
He should’ve dropped everything and flown his ass to Colorado when he first noticed the drop in her self-assurance.
The feed finally—thank hellfinally—stopped streaming.
But he’d done this gig long enough to know the damage had only begun. His mind started running scenarios. Options for fixing. A mash-up of solutions duking it out in his psyche. Because here was the thing: Jack’s life revolved around the angle. The spin. Making things look the way he wanted—or needed—them to appear.
He was a modern-day magician for the digital age and was the best at what he did. And he fucking loved it.
He, however, was coming up blank on how to spin “urine is sterile.”
A full headache brewed like a pot of break-room coffee.Drip. Drip. Drip.
“You. My house. Dinner. Tomorrow,” Jack’s best friend and boss, Ben, gave a delayed two-knuckled knock at the side of Jack’s office door.
Jack’s office was on the twentieth floor, overlooking the city, with two walls of glass. One wall separated him from the office of the executive next to him. And the other, with the door, faced a bullpen of cubicles for the rest of the support staff.
Jack peeled his focus from the now-blank computer monitor. From the remnants of the excursion that had gone totally and utterly sideways.
He ignored Ben for the two seconds it took to punch the button on his phone again. “I need to be in Denver yesterday,” he said to his assistant. “Get me as close to April’s place as you can find—I’m talking within walking distance. I need to beclose.”
Close enough to fix this.
His assistant gave an acknowledgment and quickly clicked off the call.
