Girl Meets Billionaire

by Brenna Aubrey et al.

  “It’s not what you think.” I go to her.

  “Get away from me!” She pushes me. “All that was an act?”

  “Of course not!”

  “What’s operation good cop? Is that a thing?”

  “It was,” I begin. “A stupid thing.”

  “What’s the competency hearing? Is that also a stupid thing? A hearing?”

  I exchange glances with Brett.

  The wounded look in her eyes kills me. “You were going to put me on trial? For competency?”

  “That’s not how it is.”

  “You said you trusted me.”

  “I do trust you. I was going to call it off.”

  “But it’s still on. As of now.” She searches my eyes. “Is it still on? As of this moment?”

  My heart feels like it’s cracking. “I was going to call it off.”

  “Please, just say. Is it still on? As of now?”

  “Yes. Technically it’s still on.”

  “Technically.” She snorts. “And all this time, were you guys gathering evidence? To destroy me?” She holds up a hand when I take a step toward her. “Awesome performance. I guess that’s one thing Brett and I can agree on. It was absolutely award winning. Bravo.”

  “I wasn’t performing.”

  She grabs her purse and her jacket and heads to the elevator door, then stops.

  I stop behind her, heart pounding. Is she reconsidering? Remembering what’s between us?

  “Vicky,” I say.

  Slowly she turns, but the warmth is gone from her eyes.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll still give it back. I’ll sign and deliver those papers I drew up. For half a million.”

  “Don’t,” I whisper, when I realize the significance of the number.

  “That’s my offer.”

  “Henry—” Brett starts to say something. I shut him up with a quick look. He widens his eyes. He wants me to take it. It’s way cheaper than the millions we offered a few weeks back.

  “This isn’t you,” I say. “You fight for things.”

  “I didn’t get the half mill the last time around. So you’ll pay it to me, and if you don’t, the world will learn that Vonda O’Neil and Smuckers run your company.”

  “Vicky.”

  “It’s Vonda,” she says. “I’m Vonda O’Neil. And I have to say, keeping me on good behavior with the good cop act while you gather evidence for the hearing? Very effective. Who knows what I would’ve done. Maybe even painted those cranes pink, with Smuckers’s face—”

  “We’ll pay!” Brett says.

  “I don’t want you to go,” I say. “Brett is going.”

  “A bank transfer.” She fishes out a checkbook and tears off a deposit slip. “Five hundred thousand and you’ll never hear from me again.”

  “I wasn’t pretending—you know I wasn’t. Feel the truth of that. Of us.”

  Her eyes are cold. “If you follow me or try to contact me, I’ll tell the New York Tribune the story of Vonda O’Neil and a dog and their hold over Locke Worldwide.”

  I get between her and the elevator door, but I don’t touch her. I’m not Denny. Except it’s too late. “I know what this looks like to you.”

  “Do you?” she asks. “Please understand when I ask you to leave me be. Respect me on that. Have the money in my bank account by bank open tomorrow. With that you’ll get my silence and your company back.” She stabs the elevator button. “If the money isn’t there, you can kiss the stability of the Locke name goodbye. You’ll learn firsthand about the power of the Vonda name.”

  “Screw the company. I want you,” I say.

  Brett grabs my shoulder. “Dude.”

  I shake him off. “We got this, Vicky.”

  Her eyes shine as she backs into the elevator. She stands in there alone, finger stab-stabbing the button like she always does.

  “It doesn’t actually go faster when you do that,” I whisper, but the doors are already closed.

  Chapter Thirty

  Vicky

  “The day after tomorrow?” Carly is inconsolable when I tell her we have to leave. Her eyes shine wild. “It’s my junior year,” she says. “We can’t just leave!”

  “We have to.”

  “But we can’t! Please…”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  She collapses in a heap on our ratty green couch. “And our show just went up. And Bess…oh my god, I’ll never see Bess again!”

  “You’ll see her again.” I hope. I think. I wrap my arms around myself.

  “All my friends. Our whole life. If I leave school they’ll never let me back in.”

  “I know, baby.”

  “Isn’t there some other way? There has to be! You always think of something. You always do.”

  The hope in her eyes kills me. “I thought about it long and hard. This is the best I can do for us.”

  She flops back, staring listlessly at the ceiling.

  I’m letting her down. I tried to take too much. I tried to fly too close to the sun and I got torched. I wipe the thought of Henry from my mind’s eye. He might be calling, but I’ve long since blocked him.

  “All our stuff,” Carly says.

  I want more than anything to wrap her up in a hug, to give her the hug that I actually really want for myself, but she’s not in the mood. “I’m sorry.”

  “What if I finished out the semester living at Bess’s place? And then maybe it all dies down…”

  “Connect the dots, Carly. Denny will spill. He lives to make my life miserable. Or somehow it gets out—too many people know. And Mom hears. She’s going to want you back. Especially if she sniffs the money—she’ll want you back and she’ll figure out an angle.”

  “She’s a drug addict! She didn’t even file a missing persons report. Won’t they see?”

  “She’s your mother and I’m Vonda—that’s what they’ll see. They’ll put you back with her. You’re leaving New York with me or her. You know I’m much more fun.”

  She picks up a bright green scarf and a soft sob escapes her lips. Deep down, she knows I’m right. She was young, but she remembers the scary guys, and they’re still there. We know this because we secretly follow Mom on Facebook. We see her pictures, most of them from the inside of a bar or somebody’s trashy living room.

  I sink down next to her. “We can go a lot of places with that money. Where do you want to go?”

  “Nowhere. I want to go exactly nowhere.”

  “Me, too,” I say. I look around, despairing. Aside from the couch, the furniture isn’t ours, but we collected a lot of little treasures over the years. We fought hard and we made a life.

  “We’ll never see the sad mimes or fierce protector guy again.”

  “I know.” I set a hand on her forearm. “Let’s think of a cool place to go where you can continue your theater training.”

  We go out to get stupid-amount-of-candy ice cream, passing the sad mimes on the way. We hug them and get white paint on our cheeks.

  We talk plans at the ice cream place. I nix Los Angeles—it has to be overseas. I already spoke with my ultra-expensive fake ID guy—he feels like he can swing overseas work visas under different names.

  We settle on London. It’s the theater scene that sells it to Carly. And it’s a big city like New York. A place to get lost.

  We look for VRBOs on our phones, and when we find one, we pay a random neighbor to arrange it; that way we won’t leave a trail.

  We’ll head to an airport hotel ASAP and arrange the rest of the move from there. It’s important not to leave a trail, because if the story about me and Smuckers and the company pops, the media spotlight will be relentless.

  Brett seems to think he has Denny contained, but he doesn’t know that piece of shit like I do.

  I leave Carly at our place, packing boxes to ship. A classmate of hers and her mother are taking over our parrot-sitting gig, because long-term pet sitting gigs on the Upper West Side are easy to fill. She’s going to introduce the
m to Buddy and show them how it all goes.

  I head out to meet Latrisha at the studio. It’s dark outside when I get there. I thought I’d feel sad when I walked into the place, but I feel strangely proud. The space and the community made my life better. It was a family when I had none. I wander around, just connecting with people one last time, not doing the big dramatic goodbye.

  Bron over at the smithy gives me a beer and tells me how my order will be ready in a week. I tell him that I know it will be amazing.

  Of course I tell Latrisha I’m leaving. She senses it’s trouble. She thinks it’s Henry. I promise her it’s not. She wants to rescue us, put us up in her high-security building, circle the wagons. She’s a total Joan of Arc that way.

  “You’ve been such a good friend,” I say. “Trust me. It’s better this way. A storm could be coming.”

  I make her come over to my space and look at my toolboxes to see if there are any tools she wants. I’ve got some great ones she can use for inlays and fine work.

  “I hate this,” she says. “It’s morbid. You’ve been collecting these for years. You have to take them.”

  “I’m going on a plane with a dog and a teenager. I can’t take my tools, too.”

  “How are you going to make jewelry?”

  I swallow. “I’ll figure it out.”

  “I’m taking them all,” she declares with tears in her eyes. “And I’m keeping them for you for when you return. You belong here.”

  It’s a sweet thing to say, but in the back of my mind, I think, You don’t know about Vonda.

  On the way back, I have the Lyft drive along Central Park past Henry’s building. I make him stop across the street and I look up there, wanting to catch a glimpse of him. The kitchen light is on.

  Is Henry there? Is he celebrating?

  I wasn’t pretending.

  I’d be a fool to believe that. He lives for that company. He protects what’s his.

  I wasn’t pretending. We got this, Vicky.

  I sit there and let myself sink into the feeling of his words being true, like trying on a plush and beautiful coat that you can never afford but you want to feel it around you, and for a second, maybe you even believe.

  And it feels so good.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Henry

  One month later

  It’s three twenty-two in the morning and I’m lying in bed, thinking about her. Missing her.

  I build a lot of residential projects, create a lot of homes for people, but the home I found with Vicky was beyond anything even I could’ve dreamed up.

  Now it’s rubble.

  And not the cool kind you can turn into furniture. It’s toxic and twisted up with unbearable loss, not to mention anger with myself.

  And every time I see a griffin, or that ice cream she likes, or a mime, or a hundred other stupid things, that rubble pile gets deeper. And every time I get the urge to tell her some interesting news or a funny realization, I remember I can’t.

  And the pile gets deeper.

  Why did I listen to her when she told me not to go after her that day?

  Well, I know why. I wanted to give her a little space. I wanted to respect her in a way that the world hadn’t.

  Fool move.

  I underestimated the trauma that sixteen-year-old Vonda endured, underestimated how deeply it burned.

  A day later it was too late. She and Carly were gone. Vanished. When Vicky vanishes, she doesn’t mess around.

  I got the company, just like she said I would. I got it back—full control. Cold comfort.

  I pour myself a scotch and wander out onto my veranda where she fed me cookies and joked about tea cozies. I know what they are now. I looked it up.

  The night is mild for late October. I stare up at the moon, wondering if she might be looking at it this very moment. A cliché.

  It’s unlikely she’s moongazing. It’s probably daytime where she is; that’s what our PI thinks. He had a lead for Hong Kong. A few continental European cities. Nothing panned out.

  In the dark of the veranda, I open up my laptop. Before I even check my email, I click to a section of bookmarks that’s all jewelry. It’s a morbid ritual, perusing the latest debut designer collections of high-end boutiques around the world. I also look at solo designers.

  She wouldn’t be so stupid to start up her sequined dog bowtie business again. And she probably wouldn’t create that Smuck U line I so loved and hated, either, but she has to do something.

  She’s a maker—it’s in her bones—and women’s jewelry was her passion.

  She told me so many things. I could’ve told her about the hearing and the good cop thing, explain that I’d abandoned it. Was some little part of me holding all that back to protect my advantage? Covering my ass? Needing to arrange things to come off perfect to her? Not wanting to rock the boat of our time together? Not trusting her to understand?

  I click through collections. It’s not the names I’m looking at; it’s the pieces. I feel sure I’ll see a necklace or a pin or something, and I’ll recognize her vision in it, her sense of humor, her spirit—something essentially her bubbling up out of the pages of baubles, unmistakable as a fingerprint.

  I stay out there until dawn, clicking through the images. Then I switch to coffee and get ready to deal with the world.

  Over the next few weeks, Latrisha completes the cool-as-hell furnishings for the Moreno, and we collaborate on the installation and interior finishes. I make sure the website is updated with plenty of pictures, just so Vicky can see.

  Or should I call her Vonda? I don’t know, but what I do know is that she’ll check. She won’t be able to help herself.

  I throw myself into the Ten redesign. It feels good to do the place right. The neighbors are excited—we’re experimenting with bringing them into limited sections of the process. Maybe it’s arrogant, but I have this idea that one of these days, Vicky will pull up the website for that, too.

  I want her to see it. I want her to see that beautiful things can be real. Or maybe that real things can be beautiful.

  Not everything I do that autumn is noble. I have enough anger to go around, and my sights also happen to be set on Vicky’s mother and the Woodruffs.

  The New York Nightly Reports I-team is excited about the idea that I brought them for a news-hour segment about what really happened with Vonda O’Neil. Getting the salacious truth of the story. The mindfuck that everyone was wrong about her, and the opportunity to shame the true villains on camera.

  That’s how I find myself flying up to Deerville the week before Thanksgiving with a stack of cash—a hundred thousand, to be exact.

  I got the idea for this whole thing after Brett told me that he thinks the mother still has evidence. He figured it out from something Denny said to him about the Woodruffs having to keep her quiet.

  This little nugget doesn’t put him back in my good graces, but it’s a start.

  Maybe.

  The news crew is made up of Marv Jenkins, the on-camera personality, two camera operators, and a tech guy. The address they got for Vicky’s mother, Esme O’Neil, is wrong, but we track her down to a trailer park and then follow the bread crumbs from there to a poorly lit local bar.

  I recognize her right away, down at the end.

  She’s the skinny woman drinking alone, hair dyed red, skin wrinkled beyond her fifty-something years. She looks bewildered and angry when the lights and cameras fire up—it’s an ambush and a half.

  Newscaster Marv buys her a drink and coaxes her into repeating the lies on camera. My blood boils as she tells the world how surprised she was that her own daughter lied. She’d believed the girl—how would she know her own daughter turned out to be a liar? It’s a well-worn speech, calibrated for maximum sympathy.

  Her voice wavers when she meets my eyes. Does she feel my rage? Does she sense it’s the end of the road for her story?

  The cameras go off when she’s done. I step up and slap the cash onto the scr
atched wooden bar. Bundles of fifties. The Woodruffs were paying her, but probably in the low five figures. My money adds up to more.

  “Now you’ll tell the truth,” I say. “And after that, you’ll deliver the evidence you’re holding back. We know you have it.”

  She protests, but her gaze doesn’t leave that money. When she looks up at me, there’s defeat in her eyes, I know she’ll bite. She’ll take that money. She’ll sell herself out.

  Maybe I should have some compassion.

  She lost the love of her life and couldn’t cope.

  I get it. I’ve been there.

  I live there.

  The footage they gather is insane. Esme O’Neil takes us to a safety deposit box where she has the shirt and a nanny cam—still inside a bear. There’s a cop along to keep the chain of evidence right. The footage inside the bear is Papa Woodruff and Denny bargaining with her for the shirt.

  We fire it up on a tablet. It’s captured perfectly. The money exchange is clear as day. “Helloooooo,” Marv says, sounding like a mustachioed, bathrobe-wearing porn star greeting his bedmate. “And with this, the story goes national.”

  They get Esme being sorry. They get actual lab shots of the shirt testing. It’s like one of those hidden treasure shows or something.

  The Woodruffs got a mayo-spattered shirt, as it turns out. You can never trust a drug addict.

  The news feature crew does a Denny ambush at a black-tie gala—they actually hold everything under wraps just to surprise him at the gala. They make him repeat the lie about how Vonda must have fixated on him, and how he doesn’t blame her for the lies.

  They run the footage on a phone for him. They get it on camera, him watching himself standing behind his dad in the sad O’Neil living room all those years ago, paying Vicky’s mother for the shirt.

  He calls it fake news and storms out of there, lawyering up soon after.

  There’s a simultaneous confrontation with the Woodruffs on their doorstep that night—the same doorstep they stood in when they announced they forgave Vonda and that they’d drop the charges.

  There’s nothing the public loves better than liars getting caught on camera.