Mansi nodded.
As they walked back inside, Olivia chewed her lip in thought, wondering if they really could pull it off. She thought of what was riding on it, of Grandma Ruby happily laughing with Violetat Willow Grove. She thought of how absolutely mad Chuck drove her and how she’d wanted to shove him out the window on Saturday morning. She wondered if she could keep one in check for the greater good of the other.
When they returned to the conference table ready to negotiate, she took Cameron’s inside intel to heart and opened the discussion with a bold move.
“I want to make two things clear if we are going to agree to this,” she said. All eyes turned to her. “I want an advance…” She trailed off and glanced at Mansi to make sure she wasn’t out of line. Mansi subtly, if not curiously, nodded.
The femaleName Your Pricelawyer glanced at Parker, who bobbed his head a fraction. “We can accommodate that, Ms. Martin,” the lawyer said.
“Good,” Olivia said with a rush of relief. She could use the money up front to pay off her Willow Grove debt and keep Grandma Ruby comfortably in her home while she did the show.
“And the other thing?” TJ asked, sounding genuinely intrigued.
Olivia sat up straighter and looked at Parker. “Mr. Walsh and I have agreed on new terms.”
Chuck leaned forward in his chair to cast her a curious look.
She kept her gaze straight ahead on Parker. “We want a million dollars. Each.”
Parker blinked hard once. TJ’s lip curled up. The lawyers remained neutral. Olivia felt Chuck’s gaze bore into her for a hot second before he straightened himself in his seat and calmly looked across the table.
He nodded once and then said, “Each.”
Chapter
4
Olivia walked out of themeeting in a daze. After an hour of negotiation and a few phone calls, they’d settled on a final agreement—including the stipulations of a fifty-thousand-dollar advance and a million dollars as the prize money. Each. She couldn’t believe it. Her heat-of-the-moment declaration on the street had the potential to change her life. All she had to do was live in a house with her ex for a month and not kill him. Which may be easier said than done, but she’d figure it out. She had a million dollars on the line.
“You’re sure?” Mansi had whispered to her one last time before she inked her name into the contract. Olivia wasn’t sure about Chuck, but she was sure she needed the money, so she’d nodded and scrawled her signature.
They all shook hands, and Parker told them they would be in touch soon about a schedule since they didn’t want to lose any momentum with the video having gone viral.
When they parted to carry on with their days, Olivia gaveChuck a frosty glare and climbed back into Mansi’s Mercedes. They were paying her to live with him, not be nice to him.
“Well, this is gonna be fun,” Mansi said. “A month of Chuck Walsh just when you thought you were done with him.”
“It will be painful but necessary,” Olivia said. “Thanks again for coming.”
“Of course. I just don’t want to have to say I told you so when you want to kill him after one day.”
“Oh, I already know I’ll want to kill him. The next four weeks will be a test of restraint and summoning the acting skills buried in my heritage.”
Mansi gave her a small smile. “Well, let’s hope you’ve got your mom’s chops.”
Olivia smiled back. As a kid, she used to put on her mother’s movies and pretend she was the one having a conversation with her instead of her scene partner. She’d memorized lines of dialogue from her romantic comedies and the few more mature dramas that her grandmother had let her watch. No such opportunity existed for her father, seeing that he was never in a movie, and that had left the fragile bond tying her to her parents at all a hair thicker for her mother. Now this bizarre opportunity had given her a chance to explore a side of herself rooted in the defining characteristic of the woman she’d never known, because if she was going to survive living with Chuck in front of cameras, there would be a fair amount of pretending going on. The thought of it put a warm, if not slightly intimidated, sensation in her chest.
Mansi drove Olivia back home, where she got in her own car to head to work. Most everyone at the magazine worked remotely these days, but Olivia enjoyed coming into the officewhen she needed an escape from the four walls of her tiny apartment. She thought breaking the news to her boss that she needed time off to be on a TV show was something better done in person anyway.
When she arrived at the building that housedMix, she took the elevator up to the fourth floor. A few coworkers sat in their cubicles, but the grid of mostly empty desks looked like the final moments of a chess game with only a few pieces left on the board.
In a turn that she herself still to this day didn’t fully understand, she’d made a career out of writing about celebrity culture. It was a strange addiction of sorts. Media coverage was all she had to remember her parents by, and while she abhorred what she saw there, steeping herself in that world helped fill the ugly, misshapen hole in her heart over what the media had done to their family. It was a scab she couldn’t stop picking. Perhaps some subconscious drive to infuse more integrity into reporting on celebrities as artists, to spare the world the type of headlines she’d seen about her parents and the tragedy that befell them, kept her around too.
She walked to her desk, dropped her bag, and woke her computer. The screen fizzled to life, and her eyes went straight to the number in a round, red dot informing her how full her inbox was. She grimaced at it and scanned the first few messages at the top. One stuck out, a reminder from Willow Grove that her payment was past due, although that problem now at least had a short-term fix. She decided that rather than diving into the rest of the messages sure to overwhelm her, she would go tell her boss her news.
Stephanie had an office in the row of small suites aroundthe floor’s perimeter. She never worked from home because she had two small children who made it near impossible. Olivia found her at her desk wearing her customary look of simultaneous focus and frazzle. Her blond bob was pulled half back in a clip, and her sleeveless blouse had a smudge near the collar that looked suspiciously like Magic Marker. Stephanie always reminded Olivia of the eye of a hurricane. Chaos swirled around her—her children, her job as a senior editor—but she herself was remarkably calm.
Olivia knocked on her doorframe.