Chapter 5 The Weight of Fake
MIA
The word kept finding me no matter how many times I tried to outrun it.
Fake. Fake girlfriend. Fake relationship. Fake smile held perfectly in place across a press conference table while cameras flashed and Caleb Kessler's hand rested warm and heavy on my knee like it had always belonged there, like this was not the most elaborate transaction either of us had ever agreed to.
I lay on my back in the dark at two in the morning still wearing my jeans from the day before, staring at a ceiling that had nothing useful to offer, and I could not make the afternoon stop replaying. The way he had leaned toward the microphone with that easy confidence. The way his voice had dropped slightly when he said she makes me want to be better, not for the cameras, for me. The way the entire room had gone soft and quiet like they believed every word coming out of his mouth.
The worst part was how much it had sounded like the truth.
I pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw static.
This was a transaction. Twelve pages. Digital signature. Thirty thousand dollars in exchange for six months of showing up and not flinching. That was the complete and entire arrangement. I had signed it at midnight in my kitchen with the hospital bills in the drawer and Mom asleep on the couch, and I had made a deliberate decision not to feel anything about it because feeling things about it was a luxury I genuinely could not afford.
But his hand had been warm.
And he had known exactly how I took my coffee without asking.
My phone lit up on the mattress beside me.
Chloe: You almost smiled when he touched your back. I caught it. Do not deny it.
Mia: I was performing.
Chloe: Sure you were. And the way he looked at you the whole time? Was that performing too?
Mia: Go to sleep Chloe.
Chloe: He looked at you like you were the only actual person in that room, Mia. The cameras were basically an afterthought.
I put the phone face down and stared at the ceiling.
She did not understand. Her mother was not sick. Her brother's hockey equipment was not held together by duct tape and the specific prayers of a sixteen year old girl who had learned equipment repair from YouTube videos at midnight because professional help cost money they did not have. She got to sit on the outside of this whole thing and decide it was romantic.
From the inside it was a contract with a payment schedule.
Through the wall I could hear Mom breathing. I started counting without deciding to. One. Two. Three. Slow. Steady. Still there. I had been counting her breaths through that wall every single night since the diagnosis and I could not stop even on the nights I told myself to stop, because stopping felt like tempting something, like the counting itself was the thing keeping the rhythm going.
I knew that was not how biology worked.
I counted anyway.
At three in the morning I gave up on sleep and opened the contract on my phone and went back through the pages. Page eight had a clause I had not thought about carefully enough. Both parties agree to maintain the appearance of a genuine romantic relationship at all family events as required by the Client. I read it twice. Family events. I had agreed to that without understanding what it actually meant, and what it meant was Richard Kessler's dinner table. Standing in the Kessler house and convincing a man who had built a corporation from nothing that his son had genuinely fallen for the team manager from the east side whose mother was sick and whose apartment had peeling paint in the bathroom.
I put the phone down and looked at the ceiling some more.
The radiator hissed in the corner. The building settled around me.
The problem was not the contract. The problem was the moment in the corridor after the press conference when Derek was already packing up and the cameras were gone and it was just us in the hallway and Caleb had said maybe you are and I had said don't and he had asked don't what and I had said don't say things that make this harder to walk away from when it is over.
He had looked at me like he already knew I was losing the argument.
My phone buzzed again. I picked it up expecting Chloe.
Caleb: Press conference at two tomorrow. Wear something that doesn't make you look like you're attending a funeral.
I stared at the screen for a full thirty seconds.
Mia: This is how I always dress.
Caleb: Exactly.
I put the phone down and pressed my hand flat against my chest.
He infuriated me. That was the part nobody was going to believe if I tried to explain it to them, that the thing I was most struggling with was not the pretending or the cameras or the money. It was that he was significantly more infuriating and significantly more human than I had planned for, and the combination was doing something to my carefully maintained equilibrium that I did not have time for.
I fell asleep somewhere after four.
My phone rang at seven fifteen.
Unknown number. Local area code.
I picked up.
Is this Mia Lin, the woman said. I am calling from Dr. Patel's office at Hamilton General. We need you to come in tomorrow morning regarding your mother's recent scan results. Can you be here at nine.
I sat up in the dark.
Her next scan was not scheduled until, I started.
We moved it up, the woman said carefully. Dr. Patel would like to speak with you directly. Please come in at nine.
The line went quiet.
I sat in the dark with the phone still warm against my ear and the word fake dissolving into something that had nothing to do with transactions or press conferences or Caleb Kessler's hand on my knee.
Just fear.
The specific kind that had been living in my chest since the first diagnosis and had never fully left.