23. Gianni

gianni

. . .

I checked my phone again, but she hadn’t sent the text yet saying she’d arrived. When she did, I was going to pretend my flight was delayed and ask her to come in.

She’d be aggravated, but hopefully she’d do it. I wondered when it would hit her that she wasn’t walking up to my old apartment, the one she’d been to the night of the blizzard.

I looked around, making sure for the millionth time that everything was in place. Winnie had said to go big, and I hoped this was big enough.

It had been torture keeping the plan to myself for the last six days, especially knowing how Ellie felt and seeing her desperately try to hide it, but that’s how long it had taken me to arrange it all—extract myself from the Hot Mess contract, reach out to Fiona Duff again, rent the bigger apartment, move in, and decorate.

That was key. The décor.

From the moment I’d left my parents’ house last week, I’d known what I was going to do. I hadn’t told anyone what I was planning except my parents and Felicity MacAllister, since I wasn’t actually leaving Etoile after all. She’d been completely gracious about it and promised she wouldn’t say a word to anyone, especially her sister. Apparently, Winnie was notoriously bad at lying. No one in their family ever trusted her with anything meant to be a surprise.

I was a little worried that Ellie might inadvertently see something online about me being replaced as the host of Hot Mess, but I’d gotten lucky there.

Now if that luck would just hold out—if I could remember all the things I wanted to say, if I could convince her that she meant more to me than any career move, if I could persuade her to give me the chance to make her happy...I’d feel richer than any Hollywood money could have made me.

But first, she was probably going to want to punch me in the face.