“Abby? Earth to Abby…”
“Hmm?”
She snapped out of the deep, spacey funk that had clouded over her for the millionth time that morning to find one noticeably concerned Head of the Social Media Department staring at her from across the white-clothed café table they’d sat down at an hour ago in The White Rabbit. To his left and right were his department associates and Abby was sandwiched in-between two more, all young, hip, and welcoming professionals whose ranks she’d been vying to join.
All eyes were on her as Lance repeated the question that Abby, bogged in heartache, hadn’t caught, “I asked, how does it feel to officially be one of Tate & Cane’s latest social media marketing geniuses?”
Abby mustered an appreciative smile, made a point to look each of them in the eye, and tried to sound enthusiastic as she replied, “I couldn’t be happier! Thank you all so much!”
She lifted the cooling latte she’d been working on up to her mouth and took a sip to hide what she feared was a plastered-looking, disingenuous smile.
It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate being hired in their department. She was ecstatic in fact, and her transition would be seamless since both Olivia and Lance had agreed to pass Abby over from one department to the other in a few days when Olivia’s regular assistant returned. But Abby could barely feel the elation. She was mentally happy, but not emotionally.
Nothing could compensate for her broken heart.
The rug had totally been ripped out from underneath her.
She’d had no clue the contract she’d signed had a built-in ‘out’ for Zach and only Zach. Admittedly, she hadn’t read it whatsoever. She’d thrown caution to the wind and signed on the spot, and maybe that was naïve of her, but still…
Had he known?
She snapped out of it once again before any of her soon-to-be co-workers could notice she’d slumped into dark ruminations. Everyone was getting up from the small table tucked against the café’s large, picture windows so Abby followed suit, thankful that the crisp, autumn air to come as they walked back to the Tate & Cane building might be enough to help clear her head.
It wasn’t.
Though she managed to politely interject interested-sounding comments into the associates’ casual conversation about marketing trends and how social media campaigns didn’t have to be a poor man’s AdWords as they made their way up the busy, Manhattan avenue, Abby felt lost and hollow.
The attorney that had showed up at her door when she’d expected to see Zach had been soulless and brash. He’d informed her the entire contract was null and void, except of course for the dozens of non-disclosure agreements she’d signed swearing her to secrecy about the entire arrangement. He’d warned her that a restraining order was in place and if she tried to see or even contact Zach, she’d be prosecuted by the fullest extent of the law.
It had been enough to make her head spin and the fact that it was happening at all, that some strange man in an Armani suit was essentially breaking up with her on Zach’s behalf while she clutched the doorway, blindsided, and tried not to hyperventilate, had been, in a word, surreal.
It hadn’t been until he’d left and she’d closed her apartment door that slowly, gradually, the horrifying magnitude of what had just happened began to hit her.
She thought Zach was the love of her life.
She thought he felt the same way!
She winced as she lowered into her desk chair, having parted ways with the social media associates on the elevator and returned to her floor where Olivia was in the throes of a heated telephone argument deep inside her sleek office.
She should’ve never slept with him.
What had she been thinking?
Abby angrily shoved her purse into the bottom drawer of her desk and woke her computer from its slumber.
She was mad at herself.
She was furious at Zach.
She felt helpless and out of control.
She had given him something she had been saving her entire life, something she had been saving for her future husband, something she could never get back!
Did he even care?
Had he even loved her?
It made her want to take something from him…
Old Testament style…
But Abby wasn’t a vengeful person.
She realized she was fiddling with the cross pendent hanging from her necklace.
No, she didn’t want to hurt Zach in the same way he’d hurt her. She didn’t want anyone to be hurting, least of all herself.
She just wanted to talk to him, to try and make sense of what in the hell had happened, why all of a sudden and seemingly out of the blue when everything between them was great and his publicist, Darlene had only praised her for how well she’d been doing… Why end the relationship?
Nothing made sense.
She wanted to be with him. She wanted nothing to have changed and yet in the blink of an eye absolutely everything had.
Her life had gone from heaven to hell. That’s what this feeling in her chest was, the heavy heart, the fact that she’d cried her eyes out all night, wallowing in the closest thing to misery she’d ever felt. It was a hell she didn’t deserve, and nothing could distract her from it, uplift her out of it, or otherwise soften the excruciating sting.
She tried to read a new email that had popped in, but it was a useless struggle. Her eyes didn’t seem to work, or maybe it was her brain. She kept reading the same sentence over and over again but retained none of it.
“Abby?” Olivia called from behind her stately office desk.
“Coming!” she replied, trying to sound as perky as possible.
Olivia looked like a polished goddess in such a flawless way that called to Abby’s attention that her own eyes probably still looked puffy despite the hoards of eyeshadow she’d caked on to hide that glaring reality. The executive lifted her blonde head, diverting her eyes from something concerning on her computer screen up to Abby, who was standing, notepad in hand, in front of her desk.
“Congratulations,” she smiled and as Abby let out a breathy ‘thanks’, she added, “please, have a seat.” As soon as Abby settled into one of the plush, white chairs across from her, she went on. “I heard the good news of course and I’m so glad you’ll be with us for the long haul.”
It was getting harder and harder to muster a smile and by the time she said, “I’m really happy,” she wasn’t even sure that she had.
Olivia’s perfect eyebrows knit together and she cocked her head. “You don’t sound happy.”
“I am,” she tried to assure her, but again her voice sounded flat.
A knowing, empathetic and pained look came over Olivia’s face and after holding Abby’s gaze for a beat, she pulled what Abby quickly realized was a trashy tabloid magazine out of her lap-drawer and set it on her desk facing the young, sad-looking woman across from her.
“Is this why getting hired at Tate & Cane isn’t making your day?”
Abby grimaced at the shiny cover. It featured a huge, happy-looking photo of Zach under the headline ‘Back on the Market, Ladies!’ At the bottom-right corner was a little bubble image of Abby looking forlorn and, quite frankly, terribly disheveled in saggy sweatpants and an unflattering autumn coat that she’d incorrectly buttoned, evidently. Must have been taken yesterday.
“Yup,” she said in delayed reaction to Olivia’s accurate guess.
“What happened?”
“You said it yourself. A contract is no guarantee.” After a moment, she realized Olivia was looking for an actual answer so she supplied, “Apparently there was some loophole clause or, I don’t know, sentence that gave Zach an out.”
“And he took it?”
“Don’t remind me,” she said heavily. “I’m not allowed to talk to him. I’ve been completely discarded. Used up and thrown away.” She lifted her gaze from her clasped hands and looked Olivia directly in the eye. “I thought he loved me.”
“I can’t stand seeing you like this,” said Olivia, clearly pained.
“I can’t stand feeling like this,” she agreed then dared to lie, “but I’ll get over it… eventually.”
A determined look came over Olivia and she suggested, “You could hit him where it hurts.”
Abby didn’t know where that would be. He seemed completely invulnerable. And even if he had an Achilles heel, would she want to take her shot? Would that make her feel better? She doubted it.
“You could break the contract.”
“The contract is null and void,” she told her halfheartedly. “There’s nothing to break.”
“I’m not talking about the marriage contract.”
Abby’s eyes snapped up to Olivia.
“I’m talking about all those non-disclosure agreements you surely signed,” she explained.
What kind of voodoo was she practicing that she seemed to know the secretive ins and outs of how these types of arranged marriages go down?
Impressed, curious, and a little scared, Abby asked, “Tell people that the entire relationship was all for show?”
“If Zach’s entire objective was to save his image, how is he going to look in the public eye if America knows he lured a sweet, young woman into a legally binding arranged relationship, only to dump her when his image recovered?”
“He’d look pretty bad,” she agreed, though not at all feeling like she could go through with it and do something like that to him.
Then again…
Abby could see the possibilities forming inside of Olivia’s fast-working mind and though it twisted her stomach in apprehensive knots, the prospect of shedding the secret that had weighed heavily on her for what had seemed like a lifetime felt right.
The #Blessed tagline she’d seen a million times sprang to mind:
The truth shall set you free.