Page 116 of Modern Romance January 2025 5-8

She was beginning to calm down now. The truth was, she didn’t care about what this did to the business’s reputation. It would actually be pretty easy to get out of it. What had been revealed about him was a big family secret, and since nobody had known about him, she would have plausible deniability also.

She sighed, and she put in a group call to the work wives.

“I have to stay here,” she said.

“Of course you do,” Irinka said.

“You seem alarmingly okay with it.”

“Is he still... Is he still blind?” Irinka asked.

“Yes.”

“And it’s completely understandable that you can’t leave.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose. “The thing is, I either need to completely cut bait with him, and say that I was taken in, I didn’t realize that he had such a dark past, or... Or I’m all in.”

“What do you think about him?” Lynna asked.

“I think that the situation is a lot more complicated than the media is making it out to be. I think that he’s a mess. He’s certainly not the world’s favorite boyfriend. And he’s not a golden retriever. But we already knew that.” She paused. “I don’t think I realized how much of it was a conscious façade.”

“You have our support,” Maude said. “Of course you can’t abandon him in his hour of need. He’s a real person, and so are you. You aren’t just a business, or reputation.”

“Well, I’m not very happy to end up caregiving for somebody again. I didn’t ask for this.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Lynna said. “But since when does the world care if you asked for something or not?”

“I keep thinking that maybe I’d earned an easy stretch, Lynna.”

Lynna laughed. “Oh, Auggie. None of us can earn that.”

“Well then what’s the point?” Auggie asked, feeling flat and exceptionally angry at whoever had made the rules of life, because they really weren’t working for her right now.

Why was she attached to him?

Maude was right, it wasn’t just about business.

And she felt slightly feral with that realization. Because she hadn’t asked for this. Any more than she had asked to love a mother who was slowly dying for years. Any more than she had asked to be the one who had to bear the burden of that love, of that care.

She curled her hands into fists and tried to calm herself down. She didn’t like this part of herself. The one that would get so awash in her own tragedy. She wasn’t the one who had been sick, just like she wasn’t the one who was experiencing temporary blindness now.

But it hurt her. And there was no place for it to go, and maybe that was the problem.

She had not asked to care about this man. He was a registered disaster. She knew better than to like him, even the slightest bit, and yet she did.

Worse, she had gone and made him her first lover.

“I need to go,” she said, shaking her head.

“Are you okay?”

“No,” she said. “I am very deeply not okay. This has been the weirdest week of my life. And... I am enmeshed. In a way that I really wish I wasn’t, but I am. And... I’m woman enough to take responsibility for it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel horrendously sorry for myself.”

“I like a little bit of self-pity, personally,” Irinka said. “Take care of yourself. And you know if you need anything we’ll be right there for you.”

“Just hold down the fort. I don’t know what kind of storm is awaiting you all in terms of media.”

“We’ll handle it. Our official stance, of course, is that we support you, and your judgment. So anything to do with him is likely a gross exaggeration. Also, if you want me to dig up dirt on his father...”