Girl Meets Billionaire

by Brenna Aubrey et al.

Her gravestone remains in place and I think I’m losing it. Hearing voices in a cemetery must be a form of mental illness, even if grief can make you want to believe they’re not really gone.

  I’ve had eleven years, though. I know damn well she’s gone. All too well. Is this what unraveling feels like? Maybe I need to bag the whole proposal, because I don’t want to saddle Shannon with a husband who’s losing it.

  Husband. I’m going to be her husband. The word hits me like a stone between the eyes and I look at Mom’s grave. Dad was her husband. Mom was the love of his life.

  And she died.

  All because of me.

  “No, honey. It’s Marie.” I whip around and there she is, standing back, hands clasped in front of her and tentative. She reminds me of how Grace looked after everyone left the burial, just waiting in the wings until I was ready to leave, holding my bloody knuckles, arms around me as I stumbled to her car.

  “Marie?” There are a wide variety of people I would expect to run into at my mother’s gravestone, but Marie doesn’t make the shortlist.

  “I saw you in town and texted to see if you wanted to have coffee. Then I followed you.”

  I clear my throat. She throws her hands up, palms facing me.

  “I know! I know! Boundaries,” she says with a sad smile, looking at Mom’s gravestone. “I was just worried that someone had died.”

  I raise one eyebrow. “We are in a cemetery.”

  “I meant someone new had died. That something had gone wrong.” Her eyebrows meet in that pitying, older way that Grace has perfected. Marie has been taking lessons from someone, or else it’s a look that comes with menopause.

  “No. No one new has died. Just my mom.” I look sadly at the gravestone.

  Things fall apart.

  So do people.

  “Oh, Declan. It’s never ‘just’ when it comes to losing your mother. And you were so young when it happened.”

  My mouth tightens in what is supposed to be a bitter smile but just feels like anger. “It’s been eleven years. I’m over it.”

  “You never get over losing a parent.”

  My eyes fill up with what I assume is an allergic reaction to something in this damn memorial park, because I don’t cry. Men don’t cry. That’s a McCormick family rule, too. We drink, we fuck, we excel, we dominate, but we don’t cry.

  Marie moves her neck, looking up at me to catch my eye. Would my mom have crow’s feet, too? She didn’t eleven years ago, but Marie has the advantage of living these eleven years. Of aging. Of mothering her children and being alive. The years wear a person down and leave an imprint on their face, their skin, their body, their heart.

  But the alternative is so much worse.

  “Declan? Why are you here?”

  “Can’t a—” My throat is clogged and I try again. Damn allergies. Apparently, I’m developing them suddenly here. “Can’t a guy visit his dead mom once in a while without needing a reason?”

  She nods. “Fair enough.” We stand in quiet, a lawn mower starting in the distance. The buzzing sounds just enough like a wasp that I flinch.

  Marie’s eyes are alert and clever, watching me. But she doesn’t say a word.

  “You look like James, but there’s something about you that must come from your mother,” she finally says. “Andrew is the spitting image of your father. I’ve never met your oldest brother. But you...” She smiles kindly and reaches up to brush a piece of hair out of my eyes. The gesture is unnerving. Motherly.

  “It’s the hair, ironically,” I explain, pulling back a few inches so she can’t touch me.

  Marie’s eyes flit between my mom’s grave and me. She opens her mouth, lips parting, then snaps them shut. Once, twice, three times. Whatever she’s struggling to say, she’s going through monumental effort to do it, and I’m really not looking forward to it.

  “Tell me about that day,” she says gently.

  My eyes close and my shoulders drop. I don’t have to ask her what she means. The band of steel that snaps shut like a trap door when this subject comes up isn’t there. Shannon pried it open shortly after we got together for good and I told her the whole story.

  She’s the only person, other than medical authorities, who has ever heard it. Dad didn’t want to know. Even Andrew has never asked. He knows what he remembers, but not what I experienced after he passed out.

  And now, Marie.

  “There’s not much to tell. We went to one of Andrew’s soccer games. It was May, the day before my senior prom. He was a sophomore and I was a senior and Mom was filled with the craziness of planning my graduation party. She was lecturing me on how to treat my date because prom is every girl’s dream, and Andrew was teasing me about making sure I got a nice hotel room so I could deflower her,” I say, the words slow, my mouth filled with cotton and regret.

  Marie makes a small noise of encouragement.

  I can’t help but grin at the memory. “Yeah. Mom loved that. Smacked him upside the head and told him he was being vulgar.”

  I sigh. The memory isn’t just a series of images in my head, retrieved to repeat and tell. It’s like they’re living in my mind, like I can smell the freshly-cut grass around the soccer fields, hear the ref blowing the whistle, the shrill sound cutting through my thoughts.

  “Mom wanted to go for a walk while Andrew was between games. She loved the trails in the park. There was this creek that we played in as kids. Lots of rocks and little pools. The perfect place to bring rowdy little boys for an afternoon.” My voice hitches on the last word. I imagine me and Shannon taking Jeffrey and Tyler there and make a mental note to mention it to her.

  I think it might be good to revisit there on a happy note with little boys who can play and throw rocks and get muddy.

  I’ve never been back.

  “And we were walking near the water when a swarm flew by. It just—pure randomness. You ever see a wasp or bee swarm?”

  Marie shakes her head.

  “It’s marvelous.” I can hear the wonder in my own voice. “Frightening and powerful. Hypnotic. At first you have no idea what it is. The damn thing looked like a ball of darkness in the sky, moving impossibly through space. My eyes kept trying to pattern match and turn it into birds. And then, as it passed overhead, we realized what it was.”

  “Mom shouted and ducked. Andrew just stood there, stunned, like me. And then he screamed, a high-pitched sound like a little kid. Again.” I’m reliving it now, eyes stuck on the word loving on Mom’s gravestone.

  “Mom made a funny noise of pain, a muted sound. I remember shoving Andrew down to the ground, with Mom, and he jerked, grabbing his leg. By the time the damn wasps were gone he’d been stung at least three times—the doctors weren’t sure about a fourth sting—and Mom twice.”

  “Oh, God,” Marie says quietly. I can’t bear to look at her. She’ll have tears in her eyes. And if I’m going to tell the story, I just can’t look at her.

  “Mom told me to stay calm. We knew she had a bad allergy and I knew she had an EpiPen in her purse. Andrew was screaming. No one was anywhere near—we were at least a half mile from the soccer fields, though you could hear the loudspeaker announcements from a distance. Mom handed me her purse. I knew what she meant.”

  I can remember the warm touch of her fingers as we exchanged the bag. Her manicured nails, a pearly pink. I can’t say that part aloud. It’s mine. Private.

  “‘EpiPen,’ she croaked, her breathing labored already. I could see the two stings on her elbow as she pulled her shirt up.”

  “Two?’ I remember shouting.”

  “’Andrew’,” she rasped, crawling over to him. And then I realized, as I found the EpiPen in her purse, that she wasn’t the only one struggling to breathe.”

  Marie is crying softly now. I can hear her. She comes up to me and places a hand on my forearm. I don’t move, but my eyes start to leak.

  Damn new allergies.

  “‘Where are you stung’? I asked him, and Andrew pointed to h
is calf. Two stings, then one on his neck. He sounded like he was having a horrible asthma attack.”

  Gravel on the road behind us crunches as a landscaper’s truck drives through, equipment loaded on the back. The sound of the lawnmower is gone.

  Good.

  It sounds a little like a swarm.

  “Mom pointed to Andrew, then the EpiPen, then back to him. ‘Inject him,’ she said, sounding like she was choking.” I finally look at Marie. “And I froze.”

  “Anyone would, Declan. Anyone. And you were just a boy.”

  I squeeze my eyes tight and go on, watching it behind my closed lids. “‘No,’ I said. ‘You need it, Mom.’ She just shook her head, hard, and tried to grab the damn EpiPen from my hands. Andrew was passing out. Mom’s lips were turning blue and she grabbed my face so hard, looked in my eyes and said, ‘Do it.’”

  Marie squeezes my arm.

  “So I did. I opened the pen and shoved the needle as hard as I could in Andrew’s thigh, and then I got up and ran as fast as I could to the soccer fields. Could barely breathe, but said enough to get all the people who had cell phones to call 911.”

  “You did everything right,” Marie says, patting my hand.

  “Did I? Did I really, Marie? Because my mom is dead. Dead. I didn’t do anything right that day.”

  “What else do you think you could have done, Declan?” she asks, digging through her purse to hand me a tissue.

  “What’s that for?” I ask.

  She points to the front of my shirt. It’s wet.

  “Oh.” I wipe my eyes with my palms.

  “You did everything right. Andrew lived. No one could have ever guessed he was allergic, too. And your mom asked you to save him and you did.”

  “But I couldn’t save them both!” I’m shouting at her. She is crying but not scared. That’s because I’m not angry at her. I’m angry at a world where I couldn’t save them both.

  The same world I have to live in, day in and day out.

  “Why did Mom make me inject Andrew? Why did I listen to her? If I’d injected her, maybe Andrew would have been fine. And then—”

  Marie grabs my arm, hard this time, with a yank that isn’t at all compassionate. It jolts me and makes me look down at her.

  “You listen to me,” she says in a hard voice. A mother’s voice, the kind moms use when they are disabusing you of an errant notion. Her finger comes out and she shoves it in my face, making a point. “Your mother did what any mother would do. That’s what being a parent is, Declan. When you are dying and your child—your baby—is dying right in front of you and only one of you can live, you beg that your child lives. Because no parent could ever bear to live in a world where there was a choice and they chose themselves.”

  “But—”

  “No, Declan. No buts. I don’t care what you’ve been told or who has told it to you, and that includes your father. You did nothing wrong that day. It was not your fault. No one can control everything. No one. The world just keeps proving that over and over again. You did nothing wrong.”

  If I squeeze my fisted hands any harder my fingers will snap off.

  “Declan. Declan,” she insists. “If you had injected your mother and Andrew had died, that would have been so much worse for her. Do you understand? She needed you to save her baby. You did exactly what she wanted most in that moment. You took a terrible situation and made the best of it. You were heroic. You were your mother’s hero. You didn’t have a true choice. She made it for you. That was part of her gift to you. She loved you and Andrew so much that she took the choice away.”

  My shoulders start to shake and I fall to the ground, head between my knees, eyes fixated on that carved word.

  loving

  “Come here, honey. It’s okay. Come here,” she says, giving me no choice in whether I get a hug or not, dropping to the ground next to me and wrapping her arms around me as I curl into a ball. Marie smells like sandalwood and vanilla, like makeup and laundry detergent, and she is warm. Soft. Motherly.

  The sobs come out in embarrassing ways and I fight it, but I miss my mom. I miss her. If I could stop the world and turn back time, I’d go back and kill those wasps before they stung Andrew and Mom. I’d pack two EpiPens. I’d not go outside at all with them.

  I’d do anything to have my mother alive right now.

  No business deal, no hard-core negotiation tactics, no lavish spending can bring her back.

  Neither can closing off my heart and running away from the love of my life.

  And her crazyass family.

  “I can’t be your mother for you, Declan,” Marie says, smoothing my hair as I wipe my nose on my t-shirt hem and compose myself, feeling like a weak, oversharing jackass. “If you let me, though, I can be like a mother.”

  “But you are crazy, Marie.” I’m not smiling as I say it because I am not kidding.

  She smiles and says, “Not clinically.”

  That makes me laugh. We stand and brush off our clothes. A breeze rustles my hair. The sky is blue and wide, without a single cloud in it. Rare for a Massachusetts day.

  “I just love too much, Declan.” She tips her head to the right and gives me a look I don’t think anyone but my Mom and Grace have ever given me. “And whether you like it or not, you’re one of my kids. You didn’t come out of my vag—”

  I hold up a palm. “I get it. I don’t need the anatomy lesson.”

  “But you’re part of Shannon’s heart, and that means you’re part of our family. Which means you’re in a web of people who love each other so much they do crazy things because they feel so intensely,” she adds.

  “And because you’re crazy.”

  Marie links her arm in mine and looks pointedly at Mom’s grave. “Elena, you raised a fine young man. Thank you. Whenever he decides to pop the question and officially become my son-in-law, I’ll take over for you and continue the raising.”

  I give her the side eye. “I’m twenty-nine years old, Marie. No one needs to raise me.”

  “You think you’re done, don’t you?” she scoffs. “I’m fifty-three—er...in my forties—and I still need my mom sometimes.” Marie’s mother died of a heart attack a few years ago. Not a bee sting, Shannon assured me.

  “We all do, don’t we?” A sniff or two, a short sigh, and we both seem to have composed ourselves. I feel raw. Exposed. Like maybe I’ve given in to my emotions too much. Dad calls displays of emotion “melodrama,” and even though I understand he has the emotional development of a borderline sociopath, I can’t shake the feeling that this is all a little too much.

  I’ve completely underestimated and misunderstood Marie, though. She’s great in her own weird way. Maybe Shannon’s right about her mom. Maybe I’ve misjudged her.

  I look over and Marie’s watching my hands as I brush off my bottom.

  “You do have a fine ass, though.”

  Sigh.

  “Marie,” I growl. “Boundaries. Would you say that to your own son?”

  “Maybe. I tell Shannon I’d kill for her boobs.”

  Resting Asshole Face: Engaged.

  “Okay, okay! Sheesh! Is it my fault that some people can’t take a compliment?” she declares as we walk back to where our respective vehicles are parked.

  It’s going to be a very long marriage, isn’t it?

  Chapter Nine

  Two days before the proposal...

  We’re at work, talking in the hallway. I’m between conference calls, and it’s been the kind of day that started at 4:30am with a crisis in Singapore and is going to end at 2 a.m. with a crisis in Dublin. I can feel it.

  Meanwhile, a crisis is brewing right here, right now, between me and my beloved.

  There’s this look Shannon gets on her face when she has to tell me something she’s not sure I’m going to like hearing. Her face tightens a bit, and she looks pained. Concerned.

  Matronly.

  A lot like Grace the other day when she was in my office, grilling me about my pending p
roposal. Minus the chicken soup and crappy advice.

  “Just say it,” I might as well cut to the chase. When I’m at a negotiation I find the direct path is easiest. Insecurity is a wasted emotion. Wondering, worrying—all of that is just inefficient. An emotional drain. A horrible use of resources better spent elsewhere.

  (See why I would make a good CEO? Tell that to my dad.)

  Shannon’s shoulders drop and she starts playing with the ends of her hair, curling them up, almost chewing on them. It’s cute when she’s restless like this, but it’s ominous, too. Whatever she’s about to say is going to suck.

  “Um, so, Greg called today.”

  Oh. That. As far as I know, Greg’s kept the fake mystery shop conceit a secret, as planned.

  “And?” I can play along. She thinks I’m going to be mad that she agreed to help Greg out in a pinch with a mystery shop. I keep my grin in check.

  “And there’s this one job...”

  “We agreed,” I say slowly, like I’m talking to a disobedient child, “that you wouldn’t do any more mystery shops. I played Santa for an entire suburban mall in exchange. I was hashtagged.” I unbutton my suit jacket and lean against the wall, ignoring the phone vibrating in my breast pocket.

  “#HotSanta was pretty cool,” she says with a tone of cheeriness that reminds me what a good elf she was.

  And then there was that costume. Ho, ho, holy smokes.

  “#HotSanta existed for an hour and a half, but the odor of pee on my legs from terrified kids is branded in my scarred psyche for a lifetime.”

  She pretends to punch my arm. “C’mon. This is a mystery shop at Le Portmanteau.”

  I pretend to be impressed. “Really?”

  “Full meal. We have to order a bottle of wine. And the shop fee is $300!”

  I multiply that by four. Greg’s sharper than I thought. Affording it is no problem, and I’d spend ten times that on flowers to fill her apartment with roses if I thought it would make an impression. Somewhere deep inside, though, I feel like I can hear Greg laughing at me.

  Laughing from the finest table at Le Portmanteau.

  Focus. I need to focus. Shannon’s looking at me with excitement. “This is exactly the kind of shop secret shoppers dream of landing.”