She’d also chosen it, if she were being honest, because it was the kind of building where nobody particularly cared who you were. Her neighbors were a retired teacher, a young couple with a very loud baby, and an elderly man named Frank who grew tomatoes on his balcony and left them outside people’s doors with no explanation. It was the kind of building where Jasmine could come and go without a camera, which was why she’d had to arrange the paparazzi herself this morning. That whole charade still felt faintly absurd, calling Dove to ensure someone would be waiting on the sidewalk to photograph them arriving.
“How many are we talking?” she’d asked.
“Two,” Dove had said. “Enough for coverage, not enough to look staged.”
That was the line they were always walking. Enough to look real. Not so much that it looked like the performance it was.
Nate drove, because he’d insisted and because she hadn’t had the energy to argue about it. They’d met in the kitchen that morning, Nate looking like he’d slept well, which she found unreasonably irritating, and handing her a coffee from the place on Sunset that she’d mentioned once in passing.
He seemed to be trying, which she appreciated. And she was trying too. Their staging of moving things out of her house had gone well, and the breakup rumors had lost their steam within a few days. People had short attention spans, and those interested in pop culture were moving on to different dramas.
“She knows,” Jasmine said as they turned into the neighborhood. “About the arrangement. I told her everything. I want you to know that before we go in.”
He glanced over. “Everything?”
“The bet, the terms, the money. All of it.” She looked at her hands in her lap. “She’s my mother. I couldn’t not tell her.”
A pause. “Okay.”
“She’s not going to make it weird. She’s not that kind of person. But she knows, so don’t perform for her. She’ll see straight through it, and it’ll make everything harder.”
“I wasn’t planning to perform,” Nate said.
“You perform constantly. You just don’t realize you’re doing it.”
He laughed and shook his head. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black.”
She opened her mouth to argue, realized he was right, and closed it.
The two paparazzi were exactly where Dove had said they’d be, leaning against a car across the street with the studied nonchalance of people doing a very poor impression of not being interested. Jasmine had made her peace with it. She took Nate’s hand on the sidewalk, let him match her pace to the door, tilted her chin at the right moment without making it obvious she was tilting it. The shutters went. Thirty seconds, and then they were inside, the door was closed, and it was done.
Her mother was waiting in the open doorway of the condo before they’d even reached the fourth-floor landing, which meant she’d been watching from the balcony.
“Hello,” her mom sang out as she hugged Jasmine. Then she released her and turned to Nate, and Jasmine watched her mother do the thing she’d always done with new people.
It was a full, unhurried look, the kind that took in everything and showed nothing, that had unnerved every friend and boyfriend Jasmine had ever brought home.
“Nate,” her mom said. “I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
“I’d imagine,” Nate said, and something in the dry honesty of it made her mother’s mouth curve up at one corner.
“Come inside,” she said. “I made too much food, as always.”
She wasn’t lying; the small kitchen table was covered with it. There was a pot of rice, a pan of something that smelled like the chicken stew Jasmine had grown up eating on cold nights inArizona, cornbread still in the cast iron, a salad that was more of a gesture toward vegetables than an actual salad.
“You didn’t have to do all this,” Jasmine said.
“I wanted to.” Her mother was already directing Nate toward a chair. “Sit. You want sweet tea or something cold?”
“Sweet tea would be great,” Nate said and sat where he was told without a word of protest. He was good at reading people; she’d give him that. Her mother didn’t respond well to men who resisted being fed.
What followed was, contrary to what Jasmine had expected, a genuinely good afternoon.
It started with lunch, which stretched past the food and into the second glasses of sweet tea and the comfortable aftermath of a good meal, when the table was half-cleared and the conversation had room to spread out.
Her mother asked Nate questions. Where had he grown up? What his family was like. What he’d wanted to be before the company. Jasmine half-braced for him to deflect the way he deflected most personal things, to turn the answers general and say as little as possible.
But he didn’t. He told her about growing up in Ohio, a fact Jasmine hadn’t known. A small city, a father who’d worked in manufacturing, a mother who’d taught fourth grade for thirty years. He’d been, he said, an extremely difficult child who had been good at exactly two things: math and talking his way out of situations.
