I Do (Marriage of Convenience Romance)

by Amy Faye

  “What’s up? Why are you calling me?”

  “You’ll be glad I did, trust me.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Unless the Today Show just got into the business of lying about their own programming, I think there’s a big problem.”

  Rose shook herself awake and pushed herself out of bed.

  “Okay?”

  “They’re planning to run a story.”

  “They do it a lot.”

  “If the Today show is running it, then it’s already talk all over.”

  Rose pulled a shirt on and crossed the room to check on Vi and Sarah. They were sleeping fussily. But sleeping was better than not sleeping.

  “Stop beating around the bush, will you? Just tell me what you’re trying to tell me, and then we’ll both be able to freak out as much as you want. But first I need to know what the heck is going on.”

  “They’re teasing that Michigan Chemical, along with its brand new female CEO, are doing something very scandalous.”

  “What, you mean… sleeping with the former owner for control of the company? Scandalous indeed.”

  “I don’t think it’s that particular scandal. They used the word dumping, and I think their ‘scandal’ is going to be a little closer to an accusation of a crime. The stock markets open in three hours, and by then you’ll be worthless. They’ll be selling for pennies on the dollar.”

  Rose cursed so loud that Sarah woke up and started crying out. She was hungry. The girls seemed to be bottomless pits; Rose’s boobs were apparently not bottomless. But after a night’s rest, as far as it went with two baby girls, she was pretty much topped up.

  She grabbed the girl and held her phone to her shoulder by leaning her head hard, tried to fuss her breasts free of the shirt after only having them covered for two minutes.

  “Is there anything we can even do?”

  Duncan didn’t say anything. “Is this something your husband could help with? I don’t know. It’s not like I’m some big business guy. I work in the art department for Christ’s sake.”

  Sarah was helpful, at least. She latched quickly and quieted down at the same time. Two birds with one stone.

  “You’re right.

  “So?”

  “So I’d better get him on the line.”

  “Good. Do that. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “I’ll talk to you later,” Rose repeated back. She couldn’t begin to explain why, but the girl feeding at her breast made her feel unspeakably thirsty. So she started by looking in on Bryce.

  He was out. He always was, when she woke up. It was hard to pin down precisely when he left the house, except that it was much, much earlier than her, likely before most people who went in for the first shift at the factory, and they went in so early as to hardly be believed.

  The next step was to try to dial his cell number, one-handed. It didn’t work, and it wasn’t going to work. She could get to it when Sarah had drank her fill. But not without setting the phone down, she knew. That was a little too optimistic, even for her.

  So she poured herself a glass of water from the tap, set the phone on the counter, and tapped out the number. The phone started ringing immediately. And on the second ring, he hung up on her. She silently cursed, went back to the home screen and did a Google search.

  What was the rumor? And what was she going to do about it?

  The search turned up a mention of her. It was from some rag she’d never heard of. When she clicked the link, it just confirmed what she’d already suspected: it was some internet tabloid that was trying to get famous.

  Apparently, it was going to do it off the back of her company. And nobody had reached out for comment, or they would have been told not to run the story. Since they were going to run it, there was no point in the call if they already knew what the answer was going to be.

  She scrolled through. There were various photos of her leaving the office, photos of Bryce, photos of the two of them together.

  There was a photo of a document on a table. It wasn’t one of her tables; it wasn’t a table she’d ever seen before. But the caption claimed that it was taken by a company insider, of an internal memo. The photo had some parts magnified for easy reading, and those parts claimed that they’d been dumping chemical waste in the Detroit River.

  Which by itself was absurd. There was no easy or convenient way to do that. They’d be caught in a New York minute, and everyone with a brain in their head knew it. Everyone with a brain in their head would have refused to even try, because it was so obvious that anyone who tried would immediately get caught. Apparently she didn’t get that level of support, though. Apparently she didn’t have a brain in her head.

  And at some point, Bryce was going to have to tell her what to do, because right now she was planning to finish feeding her daughter and then start trying to murder whoever posted the blog.

  And then she’d be in jail, but she’d be right, God damn it, and that counted for something.

  Fourteen

  Rose finally reached him the fourth time that she called. Or, more accurately, after four calls, he called her back after thirty seconds. It was enough for her, and it was still an hour before she usually made her morning appearance at the office, so the reality was, as much as she hated it, she wasn’t late per se. Not yet, anyways.

  He sounded the same on the phone as he did in person. Some people are more polite; some ruder. Some were more tentative or more certain of themselves. However they felt about the phone came through the way that they talked on it. Bryce sounded like someone who was used to talking on the phone because he had to be. Nothing else.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Someone faked a leak.”

  “About?”

  “Michigan Chemical dumping into the river.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “No, of course not.”

  He let out a long, low breath.

  “What are you planning?”

  “I’ll just… I’ll just sell.”

  Bryce laughed. “Sell to who? You’re in it now, sweet. You’re not going to get out that easily.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “It sounds like you’re telling me that I’m trapped.”

  He let out a low breath. “And if I was telling you exactly that?”

  “How could that even be true, though? I didn’t do it.”

  “You missed your chance to get out of it. Now you’ve got something very valuable, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A chance to take complete control of your company. You’ve still got a controlling interest, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Hold onto it. And buy more. Hit something absurd—eighty percent of the company in your pocket.”

  “Bryce, I’m sinking here. I’m not cut out for this.”

  “You’ll do fine. Just trust me, okay?”

  “No, you listen to me, for once in your life, will you?”

  “Not this time, Rose. Calm down.”

  “How in the hell am I supposed to calm down?”

  “You’re supposed to listen to me, and I’m going to talk you through this, okay?”

  “You said nothing was going to hit me.”

  “This is going to wash out in the end. You’ll see.”

  “I’d like if it washed out sooner, rather than later.”

  “And it will. The evidence is fake, right?”

  “Unless they’re suggesting that someone smuggled out a memo that never got sent out. Certainly, I never sent it.”

  “Is it possible that the previous owner—the one before me, that is—did send it?”

  Rose let out a breath. She’d thought about it. There was a possibility. And if that possibility were to be the case, then there was at least two people she knew would have gotten that memo. Two people who could confirm once and for all.

  “Anything is possible, I sup
pose.”

  “Okay. Close that possibility. Get the answer to whether or not someone can confirm to you that it’s false.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  “Then you call up the Today show, and you tell them your name, and you tell them that you’re so glad that they uncovered this travesty, because your people didn’t during the transfer of power.”

  “Is that supposed to work?”

  “It’ll have to work.”

  “I just want out. It’ll be easier if we get out. Come on. Please. You said—”

  “I said you shouldn’t be afraid to sell. Get what you wanted, and get out. What did you want? To have the company’s name ruined and its people out of a job?”

  Rose’s head hurt and she hated to admit it but she wanted nothing more than to start sobbing. Her eyes stung and threatened to start leaking any moment. But she held herself together because she had to.

  “No.”

  Bryce’s voice was surprisingly comforting. Something told her that he seemed like the sort of man who would be trying to bully her into submission at this point, but he simply wasn’t. He was helping. Like he said he would help.

  “Then I need you to start listening to me, alright? Go into your bedroom, pick out a power suit. Something blue. It’ll set off your eyes.”

  “Okay,” Rose said. She rubbed at her eyes and picked Sarah up as she tried to crawl up onto the fireplace hearth. She’d scrape herself silly if she actually managed to get up onto the brick lip.

  “Then I want you to take two minutes, look in the mirror, and I want you to try to convince yourself that you’ve got this.”

  Rose knew that she didn’t have it. It was the most precarious situation she’d ever been in, and she’d been a single mother, with babies fathered by a man whose name she didn’t even know. But if he wanted her to think that she had everything under control, then she was going to have to figure out what she could do to convince herself.

  “Anything else?”

  “Kiss the girls for me.”

  She looked down at Sarah, who looked back up at her with wide eyes. Then she pecked a kiss on the baby girl’s forehead. Sarah gurgled. It was either happy, or annoyed, or she was thinking that she wanted to go to the bathroom. One of those.

  Fifteen

  The call itself, as it turned out, was completely painless. There was some inkling in Rose’s mind that she was being paid attention to now. That she was somebody. But the reality was that she wasn’t particularly interested in being someone. She wanted to survive.

  So someone else might have been paying attention to the press coverage she was receiving. Rose paid attention to the baby girls that had kept her as busy as she could be when she could take time away from working. The fame was something that she had, not something that she cared about.

  But apparently, it came in handy when you wanted to make sure that you got out ahead of negative press. So they promised her a call during the story, which was due to air at nine-thirty. Which gave her an entire hour to prepare, and an entire hour to realize that she was completely unprepared to discuss it.

  The hour itself was agony. She texted Bryce to call her. He did, eventually, after a fashion. But by then it was time that she needed to be off the phone. So it was less a conversation with her husband and mentor, and more a pep-talk. ‘You got this’ was the only thing she took away from it.

  She let out a breath, closed her eyes, and leaned her head back. Sarah slapped a block into the ground. It made a racket. But she wasn’t about to complain. After all, at least she was healthy and having a good time. If she made a little noise, then at least she could talk about something she was comfortable with.

  The phone rang. She let out a breath, and then let herself relax.

  “You got this,” she said to herself. She looked in the mirror. She felt like she was going to throw up. But somehow, she was going to make that translate into having complete control of the situation, and there was no other option open to her. She’d drag herself kicking and screaming into success. Because she had to.

  She flicked the green button. A secretarial voice said that they were going to put her on in thirty seconds, and asked if she was ready. She wanted to make sure that Rose wasn’t watching the show on television—it would create an audio problem. It was better not to. The conversation would be live, so it wasn’t like they were going to be able to edit it to humiliate her.

  She said she understood, and muted the television. On it, a bunch of people in thousand-dollar suits sat around with big smiles in spite of the subject matter they’d been talking about for the past ten minutes.

  The phone rang again, once, in her ear. She was already connected, of course, but it rang for the audience’s sake, at least. She waited. There was no second ring.

  “Mrs. Kilpatrick? Are you there?”

  She took a deep breath. “Rose, please. Just call me Rose.”

  “Rose, then. How are you?”

  “I was doing better yesterday,” she said. On the screen, the woman said something that Rose couldn’t hear with the audio muted.

  “I bet,” the voice on the other end of the line. One of the hosts on the television laughed. She guessed that the time delay was just enough to make sure that she didn’t curse on live television, or something. “So what do you have to say about these—frankly—very serious allegations?”

  “Well,” Rose said, hardening herself up as much as she could. “First, I’d have to say that it would have been nice to hear about them from someone other than my art department watching early-morning television!” She let out a laugh that sounded forced to her own ears.

  “You have to admit, the evidence is fairly damning, though, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t think so at all, Maria.”

  “No?”

  “Not the least bit. Now, I don’t know if this is common knowledge or not, but I just took control of the company.”

  “Yes, we heard. Your husband gifted it to you, is that right?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “Not to get off track, but when did you meet Bryce? He’s been on the show a few times, and we all thought, you know, pardon us for saying so, but we thought he was, you know… eligible.”

  “It’s been about a year, Maria. But on the topic of these allegations—”

  “And your girls? I’m sorry, I know we’re getting off topic. It’s just something I’ve been wondering about.”

  “My girls?”

  “Yeah. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. But the tabloids have been talking about nothing else for weeks, so it might be nice, you know, to get that all out in the open.”

  “All what?”

  “You know. The father.”

  “It’s not really…”

  “Is there some other baby-daddy in the family that we’re not seeing?”

  Rose sucked in a breath. She did have this. She could control the situation. And it was easier not to lie, for now. It would be easier still if she could just get them back on topic, but… if she couldn’t, then she would at least be able to deal with the fallout. She hoped.

  “They’re my husband’s children.”

  “So what you’re saying is—”

  “I’m saying, reach your own conclusions. Now, can we get back onto the topic at hand, or should I be getting on the phone with CNN?”

  On the screen, after a three second delay, the entire conversation played out in silence. The hosts shared scandalized looks.

  “You’re right. Back to the topic at hand. We’ll get back to that later.”

  She kept herself silent, and didn’t mention that they might get back to it if she didn’t hang up the phone right then and there.

  Sixteen

  This time, Rose didn’t have to call Bryce. He got into contact with her all on his own. It was a relief in a way. For almost a year, Rose had hoped that she would find out the tiniest bit about how to get in touch with him. Even once they were married
, getting him to actually answer the phone was a task.

  But apparently, you speak his name on the television, and like the Devil himself, Bryce Kilpatrick appears before you.

  “Yes, dear?”

  He was silent for a long moment.

  “You want to talk about that call?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Rose knew what he meant, of course. She knew precisely what he meant, because it had been such a shock to the talk show people that they wanted to spend all their time talking about it, and none of the time talking about the matter at hand: the fact that she was being falsely accused of something that neither she, nor any of her predecessors, had done.

  And because she hadn’t told him sooner. The first he heard of it was on the television. Rose didn’t doubt for a moment that he’d been watching.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I did exactly what you told me to do. I told them the truth: neither I, nor my predecessors, have ever issued such a memo, nor have we ever undertaken dumping efforts with or without a memo.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “But that’s why I called them. I did exactly what you asked for me to do.”

  He let out a long, low breath. Rose knew he was angry. Maybe it was wrong of her, but she was angry, too. Angry that he had put her in this position. Angry that he was so aloof all of the time. Angry that she was forced into this company, then she got punished just for wanting it to succeed.

  “You told them that the girls were mine! You didn’t tell them the truth.”

  “I told them the truth. Not a word of a lie.”

  He went quiet. Rose guessed that he was doing math in his head.

  “You.”

  “What about me?”

  “You were her.”

  “Who was I? I was your employee. I was that.”

  “In Denver. You were in Denver.”

  Rose decided she’d had enough of playing dumb.

  “Oh, so you do remember me.”

  “I was drunk,” he said. He had been drunk. So had she.