Madison

Filming resumes. His people know about me, know I'm the new wifey, and yet they act as if they don't. Nailgun and Kendall are good guys. They're easy and natural around me, and I suspect they even like me.

The publicist and the agent... fuck them is all I'm going to say on the topic of the publicist and the agent. A lot of times they don't even reply to my calls. Noah says Lydia's all right, and probably she is, but she's one of these hard-edged business types who don't quite get a woman whose highest dream is to give her man a baby. She'll never believe being a mother is the most important job in the world, and we simply don't click. The best we can do is co-exist.

Plus, it annoys me that she— along with the entirety of Barbie Strange's staff— is working to keep me off the set.

Noah on the phone isn't like Noah here in person, his hands and tongue all over me. Noah on the phone is tense and strange. A video on a screen. Sometimes he squinches his forehead like he's in pain, and I ache to stroke my finger between his eyes to rub the pain away, but I can't.

It hurts. God, how does being apart from him hurt so bad?

And I can see it hurts him too.

“I'm sorry, babe,” he says. “They won't let me go home. There's problems with continuity, and we have to film some additional scenes, and they'd rather cram it all into one weekend.”

“I can fly out to LA.”

“Flying isn't good for the baby.” Noah has this idea about background radiation exposure or some such nonsense. I feel like Lydia put that in his head, part of the plan to keep me away from the filming and any chance of being surprised by the paparazzi, but maybe he's right.

Fuck. Seems like everything's bad for pregnant women. Drinking, partying, eating the wrong food. Flying around in airplanes. Nine months of this. I'm no longer surprised that my mom's a little crazy. What surprises me is that all moms aren't a little crazy.

“Please.” Do I sound too needy? “I can drive out.”

“You need your rest, Maddy. I insist. If I thought we could be together, it would be different, but they've booked me solid every waking hour. I have to be in makeup at four o'clock every morning, and then it never stops until they finally tuck me in at midnight.” He looks as tired as he sounds, which must compound the problem, because then they have to get him up even earlier for more makeup.

My heart twists inside of me. How I'd love to be curled up spoon-fashion in bed with Noah, just the two of us, our bodies fitted together like two pieces of a puzzle. “You're the one who needs your rest.”

“Tell me about it.” He laughs, but there's no humor in it.

“Love you, Noah. Miss you. So, so much.”

“I love you and miss you too. Oh, fuck, Maddy...”

After the call ends, I yank the chain from under my blouse. Two rings now. The pink beryl engagement ring. The wedding ring. Of course, I eventually had to show them to my mom. Had to show her the wedding license too. She's been so busy lately, dating all hours of the night and day, that sometimes I suspect her of some secret relationship herself. But eventually she did wake up and realize I'd been going on with life without her.

“You need to sit down and talk to me,” I say. “Whatever it is, tell me.”

“I'm the mother. I'll decide when I'm ready to talk about what's going on with me. What matters is what's going on with you.” She smiles a strained smile. “So! A rock star. I don't know the singers of your generation, but I looked him up on YouTube and he's pretty cute.”

She's worse than the members of Club Sugar Daddy. I swear to God. The same day I show her the engagement ring, she's taking me to this jeweler who wastes no time escorting us into a back room. I don't understand what all that gleaming equipment really does, but it looks like serious business.

“He didn't buy this here,” the jeweler says.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Mom says. “If I took it to the place where he bought it, what do you think they're going to say?”

The jeweler laughs. “Second opinions are always a fine idea.”

“So pink beryl, what is that? Pink emerald?”

He puts down the loupe to look at her. “It can only be an emerald if it's green. But, essentially, yes. In fact, pink beryl of this quality is probably even more rare than emerald and, as you undoubtedly already know, ma'am, emerald is the most valuable of all precious gems.”

“More precious than diamond?” I ask.

“Well, think about the four Cs of diamonds— color, cut, clarity, and carat weight.” He pauses to see if we understand. We're women in Vegas, a town built on money. Of course, we understand. We can judge a diamond from halfway across a room. “So. Clarity is the big issue with emeralds and its cousins, pink and red beryl.” He pauses again.

“Most emeralds have imperfections,” Mom says. “It stops them from sparkling as much as they should.”

“Correct. When it's diamonds, the imperfections are called inclusions. They're visible specks, often black. With emeralds, there are usually so many inclusions jewelers had to invent a nice term for it. ‘The garden.’”

We all look at my stone, and all we see is pink light. There's no garden, no inclusions, no little black specks. Just a lovely transparent stone all full of sparkle.

“At any given size, there are many more perfectly clear diamonds than perfectly clear emeralds,” the jeweler says.

“What are you telling us?” Mom gets Botox between her eyes, so I always know she's getting upset when she starts getting that tiny crinkle there. “Is this stone the real thing or not? It seems like you're saying a genuine pink beryl of this quality would be an extreme rarity.”

“Oh, yes, it's a rarity. And it's a beauty. A fine investment.” He takes a deep breath. “In fact, I would be interested in buying it from you if for some reason...” The offer to buy tells us more than his polite words. Fuck, yeah, it's real, and it costs some real money too.

“No.” I snatch the ring out of his hands, not caring if I'm being rude. “I don't even want to hear your offer.”

Mom and the jeweler exchange looks. “It's important for the insurance appraisal,” she says.

“I don't want to know what he spent,” I say. “I'm not selling. And Noah has arranged for the proper insurance. Mom, please. Your questions are answered. He's going to take care of me and my baby. The rest of this shit, we don't need to know...”

I walk out and don't look back, and she has no choice but to hurry after me. “I'm sorry, honey.” She actually sounds sincere. “I just want what's best for you. A lot of times, most of the time, what's best involves getting the money.”

Why does everybody in this town have to think that way? I can't tell you how lucky I feel to be involved with somebody, anybody, who isn't from fucking Vegas.

“Everybody wants what's best for me. You. My friends. Most of all, Noah. He's one of us now. You need to believe in him the way I do.”

“I'm sorry.” She points toward a gelato shop. “My treat.” A peace offering.

Brecka and I, the two pregnant members of Club Sugar Daddy, soon fall into a deeper friendship. It could have been awkward, because she's about a skazillion times richer than I am, but somehow it isn't. When you look beyond money, we both have the same problems. Lane and Noah both have heavy responsibilities, and both of them have to travel a metric fuckton for their business. Lane's businesses might be bigger and more far-flung than Noah on the set of a movie, but it feels the same way from here.

“He's in fucking Singapore,” she says one day when we're sitting in a booth sipping Virgin strawberry margaritas. We're both over our morning sickness phase and well into the relentlessly eating for two phase. We're both getting bigger and bigger. It feels comfortable, sharing all that with another mother-to-be.

We both wear pink a lot these days. It matches the pink diamond weighing down her hand. Not to mention the pink beryl I'm hiding under my flirty little peasant blouse.

In a way, we're sisters. Almost twins.

“You ever think of flying out to join him?” I ask.

“Not while I'm pregnant and not for the first year after the baby comes.” She shrugs. “He has a theory about background radiation.”

I laugh because that sounds so familiar too. “It must be a theory that's going around.”

Cell phones are always flashing in Vegas. Nobody ever thinks anything of it. We walk around some aquarium where a million other people are walking, and she locks her arm around my waist and I lock my arm around hers. At the time, I don't notice, but the chain must have come out of my blouse, because later I'm going to find out that my two rings were dangling right out in public, with the beryl somehow catching the light just right.

A puffer fish inflates at the sight of us, its eyes huge as if in shock.

More lights flash, reflecting off some clear membrane in its big fishy eyes.

“What do you suppose Mr. Fish thinks about all this?” Brecka waves her arms around the flashy shopping mall full of expensive shops and cheap tourists.

“Sometimes I don't even know what I think about all this,” I say.

♫♫♫

My phone is going off like it's the end of the world. I blink awake and hit mute, and it stops making noise.

New text messages. 1,347.

What?

I blink.

Emails. 104. That's more reasonable but still... what the everlasting fuck?

Missed phone calls.

I don't even want to know.

“Mom,” I call, in case it's the zombie apocalypse or something, and she's already there, a tray with baby-healthy herbal tea, juice, and a fruit plate arranged ever so neatly on top of it.

The hell? Like my mom is the kind of mom who serves you breakfast in bed?

“I didn't want to wake you,” she says.

“The hell.”

“Delete them all,” she says. “Don't even open them.”

“The fuck.” I gulp the tea and chase it with the juice. No matter what's going on, the baby's kicking inside of me, demanding nourishment. The fruit plate is nice, but I need doughnuts. Preferably the kind with sprinkles.

Chocolate sprinkles.

“Some of the tabloid sites did a thing,” she says.

“They're always doing a thing. How bad can it be?” The last thing was a story about how Noah and Barbie had sneaked off somewhere for a secret wedding. If only they knew the truth. But, of course, that story— all those stories— didn't end up setting off an eight-alarm fire on my fucking phone. As far as the garbage press knows, I'm absolutely fuck-all nobody.

Shit. Seems like it could be only one thing.

Someone must have found out about me and Noah. But how? Had they tracked down the actual wedding license? Because that wasn't Miss Barbie Strange's name on the paperwork...

Fuck.

“It's going to be all right. We'll figure it out.” Mom takes my hand and squeezes hard. “You and Brecka, I know you're young and you don't think, but... We're going to get through this. Don't worry.”

Brecka and I haven't done anything the least bit interesting. We've lunched. We've shopped. We've strolled around the mall with Brecka's tactful bodyguards maintaining a calm distance behind us.

“I have no clue what you're talking about,” I say. “I hope you know that.”

Mom picks up my phone and taps around and then turns the screen to show me.

“This is the story that started it all.”

The story is a big, splashy photo I've never seen before. Me and Brecka, arm and arm, turning away from the aquarium. Our bellies huge, a pink diamond on her finger. A pink stone that might or might not be a matching diamond on a chain around my neck.

That thing Noah said about how they can't use my picture because I'm not a public figure? Guess what. They found a way around that. They just pixelated out my face so you can't see exactly who I am.

Which, of course, has the added benefit of drawing the eye down to my belly and the two rings on my long chain. One a pink engagement ring.

Shit, in a photo, it can't help but look suspiciously like Brecka's. Hers is diamond, mine beryl, but they're both the same spectacular shade of pink.

The other ring is even more damning, because it's my white gold wedding band.

The headline shrieks in all caps:

BIGAMIST BILLIONAIRE BABY DADDY'S WIVES ARE BESTIES FOREVER!

Oh. My. Gawd.

They know I'm pregnant— sure, by now, anybody with eyes knows I'm pregnant— and they think Lane Darnelle is the father.

♫♫♫

Brecka isn't even mad. Lane, after flying back from Singapore at the scheduled time, isn't mad. He thinks it's actually kind of funny, although he makes a little joke about sending his people out “to take care of” that photographer if I want him to.

“If by ‘take care of,’ you mean ‘gun down in cold blood,’ I'm very fucking tempted.”

Lane laughs out loud. “I like your friends, Brecka. They're refreshing.”

“I'm glad somebody's laughing,” I say.

Brecka, who's smiling, tries to firm her mouth. “We don't mean to laugh, Maddy, but it's either you laugh or you cry. You've seen all the bullshit stories they run about us. I didn't think they'd ever run your picture. I would've told you the same thing Noah did. They started running my photo in the tabs because I'm a billionaire's wife, but you're a private figure, so I thought you'd be safe from all that crap.”

“Noah wasn't wrong,” Lane says. “Nobody knows who you are. You're just a mystery girl who will be forgotten after the twenty-four-hour silly news cycle is over. Ignore it, and it'll go away.”

“I know except...” Everybody I care about knows who it is in that photo. Noah knows. One day there's a chance our child will know. “I'm tired of hiding in the shadows while he plays fake boyfriend with Barbie Strange. It's hard, you know?”

“We know.” They both say it together, a two-person chorus.

As always, they're on the same wavelength.

I feel a stab of jealousy. Why can't I have what they have? And I'm not talking about the money. Noah has plenty of fucking money, I don't care what anybody in this fucking club says or what my mom says or what anybody says. We'll be fine with what he already has.

“This secret shit is wearing on me. I'm tired of this sneaking around.”

“Oh, honey.” Brecka takes my hand. “You don't have to tell us. We can see it. You need to tell him.”