Page 9 of Fake it With Me

“I’m going to miss you,” Janice said.

I hugged her with bags hanging from my arms. “I’ll miss you, too. I’m assuming I’ll be allowed to call and text. I have no idea how busy I’ll actually be, but I will keep you updated.”

She stepped back and grabbed my shoulders. “Have fun. This is an experience of a lifetime and you’re getting paid to do it. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t feel like you’re doing something wrong. Just. Have. Fun.”

Easier said than done.

“I will.”

Back at my apartment, surrounded by shopping bags and full grocery shelves, I started packing for Maine.

This could be a huge mistake. Darek could be a nightmare to live with. His daughter could hate me. The whole arrangement could implode in the first week, and I’d be back here with nothing to show for it but a closet full of clothes I’d never wear again.

And a full pantry, I reminded myself.

But I literally couldn’t afford to say no. Not with the very real possibility that I would have to drop out of my PhD program because I couldn’t survive long enough to finish it.

It was my one chance to get ahead. Whatever the next month was going to look like, I had to make it work.

4

DAREK

I’d been pacing my kitchen for twenty minutes, wearing a path in the Italian tile. The morning sun streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Atlantic. It usually calmed me. I loved to stand in the kitchen and sip my coffee while watching the ocean do its thing.

Today, it did nothing.

Today, Liza was arriving, and I was apparently having some kind of breakdown about it.

I checked my watch for the fifteenth time. Her flight had landed in Portland an hour ago. The car I arranged should be pulling up to the gate any minute, assuming Maine traffic cooperated. Daisie was at school, wouldn’t be home until three thirty. That gave me time to get Liza settled, explain the layout of the house, establish some ground rules.

I was not the nervous type. I negotiated deals with oligarchs and tech moguls and old-money families who thought new money was gauche. I didn’t pace. I didn’t second-guess.

And yet here I was, wearing a track in my kitchen floor like an expectant father in a hospital waiting room.

This arrangement was insane. I still couldn’t quite believe I was going through with it. Hiring a woman to pretend to be my girlfriend was crazy. Crazier still was inviting a stranger into my home and into my daughter’s life, all because of one goddamn photograph.

My hands clenched into fists at the thought of it. That picture. The one that made me look like I’d been ignoring Daisie while she dangled over the edge of the dock, seconds from falling into choppy water. The one that had been plastered across every gossip site from here to California, accompanied by headlines I was pretty sure could be called defamatory. But if I sued every person that said shitty things about me, I would be making a lot of lawyers very rich and earning a worse reputation.

It was bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.

I had been there. I remembered that day with perfect clarity—the kind of clarity that comes from having it replayed in your mind a thousand times, looking for the moment where everything went wrong. We had gone to the yacht club so I could do a final walkthrough on a custom build my team had just completed.

It was supposed to take five minutes. Ten at most. Just a quick inspection to make sure everything met my standards before we handed her over. And then Daisie and I were taking our boat out for the afternoon, just the two of us, the way we did most weekends when the weather cooperated.

Daisie had been wearing her life jacket. She always wore her life jacket near the water, that was non-negotiable. She had spotted some crabs near the pilings and wanted to see them up close. So she leaned over. I held onto the back of her life jacket with one hand while I glanced at the yacht with the other. I had a grip on her the entire time. The water had been calm, barely a ripple. It was May, for god’s sake, one of the most beautiful days we’d had all spring.

But that single frame, captured from that one angle, made it look like she was about to pitch headfirst into stormy seas while I stood there admiring a boat, oblivious to my daughter’s peril.

The background looked rough in the photo. Choppy water, dark clouds. Nothing like what I remembered. My lawyers were looking into it, trying to determine if the image had been digitally altered, but so far they had no luck. The yacht club claimed the security footage was automatically erased after thirty days, so the original video was gone. All we had was this single frame, and my word against what the image appeared to show.

And it was only my word against everyone else’s lying eyes.

My word didn’t count for much these days. Not with Sasha’s lawyers painting me as a workaholic who cared more about his business than his daughter. Social media tearing me apart, calling me negligent, demanding that Daisie be taken away from me for her own safety.

I wasn’t going to show Liza the photo. I told her about it and that was enough. I knew how bad that picture looked. I didn’t want Liza to believe it. Why? I didn’t know why I cared what she believed. I wasn’t paying her to believe me.

Liza had been thoroughly vetted by Della. I had done my own background check too, hired a private investigator to make sure there weren’t any skeletons in her closet that might come back to bite me. I paid top dollar to get the quick turnaround.