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“She’s in New York.”
It’s blurted out like a confession. I half turn around, surprise on my face.
“New York? Jodie never struck me as a city girl.”
Mel laughs, a sad sound, and walks over to sit on a chaise. “She’s not. She hates it there. Lives just outside the city. Has a nice little house.” A shrug. “I lived with her for a few years before getting my own place. Worked at a few galleries in the city.”
“Why didn’t you stay?”
Mel gives me a sidelong glance, so I decide to keep the distance between us, settling on a couch on the other side of the living area.
“I’m not much of a city girl, either,” she admits. “And galleries are great, but they don’t pay well. I needed…more.”
The little voice in my head whispers that I should pay attention to this. There’s a reason she agreed to be my fake fiancé, after all, and it was money. Is she in some kind of trouble?
“So what’s Jodie getting up to these days, then? She still go to karaoke nights at dive bars?”
Mel shakes her head, smiling at the memory. Jodie belting out Celine Dion in a halter top and cut-off jeans. Too young to be a mom, still full of excitement—raising Mel anyway.
“No. She stopped that a long time ago. She works from home now as a billing specialist. Doesn’t hate it.”
“I’m surprised she gave up karaoke. And that she works from home. She was always out and about. What happened?”
The question comes out naturally, casually, but I see Mel flinch and my guard goes up.What happened?
“She had a tough few years,” she answers evasively, arms wrapping around her middle again. “She’s fine now. It was just…rough.”
My mind whirls, trying to decide which question to land on next: Did you go right to New York after leaving our hometown? Did you bounce around? What exactly was rough, and if Jodie was fine now, what had she been before?
But Melanie beats me to it and turns her clear eyes on me, asking, “What about you? How did you turn into…?”
She gestures vaguely at me—my perfect hair, a loose button-down shirt and men’s Louboutin’s on my feet. I learned a long time ago that it pays to look the part; people listen to you when you look the part. Even if the shoes are uncomfortable as hell.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I say breezily, leaning back, arms outstretched.
Mel snorts. It’s not a feminine sound and we both grin.
“You know. Like this. All rich and snotty.”
“I’m not snotty,” I argue back. “I just have my boundaries.”
“You know some employees call you Ice Man, right? It’s not exactly a compliment.”
I did know about the nickname, and things like that stopped bothering me a long time ago. If eighteen-year-old, brokenhearted Jenson could see what we’d turned into, he’d be pretty satisfied.
“I did what everyone else did. Went to college. Worked hard.”
“Got caught up in analytics?”
I shrug. “What else was I going to get into?”
“I don’t know…you just always struck me as having such big ideas.”
I lean forward, a little offended. “Dupont Analyticsisa big idea, Mel. It’s changed the way healthcare works. The marketing is what brings hospitals in, but do you know what we’re doing in terms of community partnerships? Data tracking that can prove where resources are needed? Yeah, our ticketing system is great and we have a streamlined medical record system, but it’s the analytics that matter. That’ll make things change for the better.”
Her eyes are wide by the time I finish, and I purse my lips, fighting back embarrassment. I haven’t ranted like this since I tried—and succeeded—to convince Roy that we could do a lot more with the system he’d designed in the late ’90s.
“Is that why you’re doing this?” she asks quietly. “Why you’re really doing this, I mean?”
