Nate’s jaw tightened. “She’d know it.”
“Hundred million says she wouldn’t even take the call.”
It was a joke. It was the kind of absurd number they threw around for sport, the way other men bet a beer. Nate should have laughed and let it die.
But instead, perhaps stupidly, he set his glass down. “You really want to bet that? Because I guarantee she’d do more than answer the phone.”
Graham went very still. “Go on.”
“Same hundred million.” Nate leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I’ll marry her.”
For a full second, Graham said nothing. Then the laugh came back, bigger than before, and he slapped the arm of his chair. “You’re drunk.”
“Maybe.” Nate wasn’t, not really. That was the problem. “But you’ve never once seen me back down from a bet, have you?”
That landed. They both knew it was true, and they both knew it was the worst possible thing about him. Graham looked at Nate for a long moment, then up at the screen, then back. Nate could almost see him working out the risks and rewards. Either Nate humiliated himself trying, or he handed over a fortune, or — impossibly — he pulled it off, and Graham got to be the man who’d dared him to. Every outcome was a story Graham could tell for years.
“One year,” Graham said, holding out his hand. “You have one year to marry her. If you do, I owe you a hundred million. If you don’t, you owe the same to me.”
Nate looked at the hand. He wondered if he’d lost his mind. He thought of Jasmine six years ago, before the silk and the flashbulbs, laughing at something he’d said across a small table. He thought of where he’d been the night everything had gone wrong, and what he’d let her sit alone believing.
He told himself she couldn’t possibly still hold it against him. Why would she? So much time had gone by. That had to be water under the bridge by now.
This bet was a shoo-in.
Nate took Graham’s hand and shook it.
CHAPTER 2
JASMINE
The word was new. It sounded Latin and ugly, but despite that, it was Jasmine’s now.
Fibromyalgia.Dr. Axline said it gently, then kept talking —chronic, central nervous system, pain amplification, no cure but management— and Jasmine watched her mouth move and caught maybe one word in three. The office was cold. The air conditioning hummed somewhere above the drop ceiling.
She’d known something was wrong. For years, especially the last two, things hadn’t been right in Jasmine’s body. There was the deep ache that came on for no reason. The fog that swallowed her lines mid-scene. Mornings when she woke up feeling like she’d run a marathon in her sleep. She’d blamed the hectic schedule. The travel. Not eating enough, sleeping enough, being enough. Now, a woman in a white coat was telling her the truth, and Jasmine would have given almost anything to go back to not knowing.
“Is there a question I can answer?” Dr. Axline paused. She had warm eyes, which somehow made all of this worse.
“How long till…” Jasmine stopped. She didn’t know what she was asking. How long until it went away? But it didn’t go away. That was the whole point. “Never mind. Sorry.”
“It’s a lot. You don’t have to absorb all of it today.”
But she did. There was a fitting on Thursday and an audition on Monday and a career that ran on the unspoken promise she was someone who didn’t break. In her industry, any kind of diagnosis was just another word for liability. For something that would slow you down. Make you uncastable. Cost productions money and time.
She took a tissue from the box positioned within reach and folded it into her fist without using it.
During the walk back to her car, Jasmine kept her sunglasses on and her chin level. Between the elevator and the street there was always a camera, and a woman who looked like she’d been crying would be quite a story. She found her car on the parking garage’s third level, slid into the driver’s seat, and pulled the door shut behind her.
There, in the quiet, she finally let her shoulders come down.
She didn’t cry. She’d thought she might, but the tears wouldn’t come. There was only a numbness, and wasn’t that worse?
She gripped the wheel at ten and two and breathed. In for four. Out for six. A trick her acting coach had taught her a lifetime ago for stage fright.
Her phone lit up in the cupholder before she’d even turned the key.
The photo that came up was twelve years old. Her mother at the Grand Canyon, squinting into the wind, laughing at somethingoff frame. Jasmine had set it as her contact picture a decade ago and never changed it. That had been one of their best trips together, but it already felt like a lifetime ago.
