Claire drives like a woman on a military operation and talks like one too.
She sits in the front seat of the black SUV with her tablet propped on the dashboard, stylus in hand, directing us from location to location with the calm precision of someone who has turned human beings into content for a living. Jared and I sit in the back like two children being driven to an activity neither of them signed up for. Our knees don't touch. The space between us hums.
"First stop, Café Laurent," Claire says without turning around. "Corner table's reserved. Outdoor seating, floor-to-ceiling windows — optimal sightlines from the street. The photographer is already positioned. All you need to do is look in love." She glances at us in the rearview mirror. "Think you can manage that?"
"I went to drama camp once," I offer. "I was a tree in the school play."
"Inspiring." Claire pulls up to the curb. "Hands visible above the table at all times. Hold, don't grip — relaxed, intimate. Go."
The café is exactly the kind of place I'd never walk into voluntarily — exposed brick, artisanal everything, a chalkboard menu where a single coffee costs what I used to spend on William's lunch for a week. Succulents on every table, because apparently rich people need decorative plants to enjoy their overpriced pastries.
Claire positions us at the corner table, adjusts the angle of my chair by two inches, tilts the flower vase half an inch to the left, reminds us to smile with our eyes, and vanishes into the crowd like a woman entering witness protection. The paparazzi are already in the bushes across the street. I can see the glint of a lens between the hedges, catching light like a predator's eye.
We order. Jared studies the menu with his brow furrowed, then sets it down. "Anything but apples. I hate apples."
I file this away without knowing why. My brain has started collecting his details like loose change — the fact that he sleeps on his left side, the way his jaw tightens before he lies, now apples. I don't know what I'm saving them for. I don't want to know.
He reaches across the table, takes my hand, and leans in close enough that his breath warms my cheek. To the telephoto lens across the street this looks like a man whispering something devastating and romantic to the woman he loves. What he actually says is, "Your smile looks like you're being held hostage. Try harder."
I lean in to match him, my lips close to his ear, my fingers laced through his for the cameras. "Maybe stop crushing my fingers and I'll have something to smile about."
His grip loosens but doesn't let go. His thumb traces a slow circle on the back of my hand — for the lens, obviously, purely strategic — and the nerve endings in my wrist light up in a way that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the fact that his hands are warm and large and impossibly gentle when they're pretending to be.
My phone buzzes on the table. Claire's text: Kiss. Now.
Jared reads it over my shoulder, sets his coffee down, and leans across the table. His hand slides to the side of my neck and his mouth finds mine and the cameras click like a swarm of insects through the café windows. The kiss is brief, professional, perfectly angled for the lens. When we pull apart I wipe my lips with the back of my hand under the table where nobody can see. He notices. His mouth twitches.
"Cake," he says, and lifts a forkful from the plate between us. He feeds it to me with exaggerated tenderness — the cameras eat it alive. Then he loads a second forkful, twice the size, and shoves it into my mouth before I'm ready.
I nearly choke, my eyes watering, but through the window I can see the lens still pointed at us so I laugh — a real laugh buried in a fake one, because the absurdity of choking on staged romance is the funniest thing that's happened to me all week. The second the paparazzi shifts positions, I spit the cake into a napkin and kick him under the table.
"You're a monster."
"You've got frosting on your nose." He reaches across and wipes it off with his thumb — slow, deliberate, his eyes steady on mine. The gesture is so casually intimate that my breath catches before I can stop it, my lungs betraying me in front of a plate of ruined cake. His eyes hold mine for a half-second longer than necessary, something flickering behind the green that isn't part of Claire's script. Then Claire texts the next location and the moment dissolves like sugar in hot water.
Second stop. A bridal boutique on the kind of street where the shops don't have prices in the windows because if you have to ask, you've already failed. Wedding dress shopping — or the theatrical production of it. Claire positions the SUV across the street where the paparazzi can get a clear shot through the floor-to-ceiling glass, and Jared and I walk in holding hands like two people who chose this, who dreamed of this, who didn't need a contract and a PR calendar to end up here.
The dresses are everywhere. Silk, lace, tulle, things that shimmer when you breathe near them. A saleswoman materializes with champagne and a smile calibrated to the price tag. I touch a lace gown on the nearest rack — ivory, delicate, a neckline that dips just enough — and catch my reflection in the mirror beside it. The dress against my chest. The ring on my finger. The woman staring back at me with something raw behind her eyes.
This isn't how I imagined this. When I was twenty and stupid and believed the world had a plan, I imagined a dress like this — not this expensive, not this perfect, but chosen with someone whose last name I wanted to carry. Not assigned by a PR schedule. Not worn for a telephoto lens while a clipboard-wielding woman times the duration of my smile.
The sadness is real for half a second before I pack it away. Jared appears behind me in the mirror, his hand finding my hair, fingers threading through the strands at the base of my neck. The cameras are outside. This is for them. His mouth drops close to my ear and he whispers something about the schedule — next location at three, charity dinner prep at five — but his fingers keep moving through my hair and my spine keeps tracking every point of contact and neither of those things is on Claire's spreadsheet.
A saleswoman leads him toward the fitting room with a suit selection. He goes. I turn back to the rack, my fingers still on the lace, my reflection still holding that expression I wish it would stop making.
The boutique door chimes behind me.
I look up and every drop of blood in my body goes cold. Ron is standing in the entrance — hands in his jacket pockets, hair slicked back, grinning the grin I spent five years learning to read like a weather warning. He's dressed up for this. He spotted me before I could move, and the look on his face is the one he gets when he's found something he can use — bright, delighted, the expression of a man who's just been handed a loaded weapon and can't wait to show someone what it does.