No time to take me to the restaurant—but plenty of time to take someone else.
"I'm not hungry. You eat it."
Zachary's voice dropped, casual, almost bored. "Amelia, what is this little fit about? Because I helped Susan film some videos instead of going to get the marriage license with you?"
I lifted my eyes to him, disbelieving, the words I wanted to say lodging in my throat as tears slid down from the corners.
His accusations came in an endless stream.
"You were the one who introduced me to Susan in the first place. You were the one who didn't want to watch her boyfriend and her best friend at each other's throats. You told us to get along."
"Now you've got exactly what you wanted, and you're jealous all over again?"
"Have I spoiled you so much that you've turned this petty?"
"You know perfectly well the bridal shoot is just an ad. The kiss is camera angles."
"Amelia, what more do you want from me?"
Right. What more do I want?
Isn't it all because of me?
Why am I always so unreasonable?
I kept my head down the whole time, tears dripping, drop by drop, onto the floor.
Breathing was getting hard.
It felt like a piece of candy lodged in my throat—couldn't swallow it, couldn't spit it out, until in the end it would just choke me to death.
The paper bag hit the floor with a slap.
Zachary and I stayed silent for what felt like a century.
In the end he grabbed his coat and left.
He didn't come home all night.
And I didn't sleep all night.
When the sky was just beginning to pale, I pulled up Susan's page again without thinking.
She'd posted a new video: the two of them sitting side by side on a balcony, talking.
It was sped up—the two of them talking, it seemed, from dark of night straight through to dawn.
These past few years, Zachary and I had fewer and fewer words for each other, our cold spells more and more frequent.
I'd thought it was work, the small daily grind, that had turned us into this.
But there was a time, not so long ago, when we'd had so much to say. So much it felt like a whole lifetime wouldn't be enough.
I stared at the screen, blank, my heart like a great hollow had opened in it.
All those words he never said to me—he'd ended up saying them to someone else after all.
I sat with it a long while before I called my mother.
"Mom… I miss you so much."
She caught the wrongness right away. "Amelia, what's the matter? Did you and Zachary fight?"
My nose stung. I forced the words out. "I want to come home."
She sighed. "I never agreed to you being with him in the first place."
"Back then you insisted on going with him no matter what I said. Threw away a perfectly good life as an heiress just to go be his secretary. You were a girl who couldn't even cook, and for him…"
I'd loved him too fiercely back then, ignored my mother, certain our feelings would stay just as they were forever.
"Amelia," she said, letting the past go, "if you're tired, come home. Mom is always behind you."
My voice broke. "Okay."
I packed a few things and set off for the company to hand in my resignation.
Zachary had built everything from nothing, without his family's help.
To be with him, I'd even cut ties with my mother, severed us as mother and daughter.
Thinking back on it now, I'd been wrong beyond all reason.
Susan had only been a small-time influencer then, barely known.
When she and Zachary first met, the two of them couldn't get through a few words without picking a fight.
Susan blamed Zachary for stealing me away from her.
Zachary couldn't stand how she was always pushing us to break up.
Then a photo of the two of them happened to go viral.
A handsome man, a beautiful woman—the internet lost its mind shipping them.
Susan gained a million followers overnight, and Zachary's company rode the fame straight to a successful IPO.
At first I didn't think much of it. Not until Zachary, for the sake of filming videos with Susan, brushed me aside time and time again—until everyone believed they were a real couple.
