Page 107 of Never To Be Mine

“I appreciate that.”

We hung up. I needed a plan.

Toby came back into the room with two bottles of water. He handed me one and sat down across from me, his expression miserable.

“This is my fault,” he said quietly.

I looked up from my phone. “What?”

“I should have been there. I should have been with you documenting the whole thing. That’s literally my job—capturing content, providing context.” He shook his head. “If I’d been there, we could have filmed you doing the taste test properly. Explained what you were doing. Made it clear you were researching the competition, not choosing it over our product.”

“Toby, that’s ridiculous. I was just tired and hungry. And despite what people online seem to believe, I’ve never claimed to eat healthy all the fucking time. And I’m not going to call you and have you drop everything when I get a hankering to have a snack, just to provide proof to people.”

“Still,” he said. “It would have been good content. I could have made it a whole thing. ‘Hollis Blackwell tries the competition’ or whatever.” He looked genuinely upset. “But I wasn’t there, and now everything is falling apart.”

“This is not your fault. You can’t be with me twenty-four seven. You have a life outside of B Well. And I’m the idiot who decided to eat that burger in public without thinking about how it would look. I forgot how much people obsess over my meals. And it didn’t even occur to me it might be a problem because we’d just announced our own burger.”

“It’s definitely a mountain out of a molehill situation,” he said. “But that’s how the internet works. It’s what guys like me hope happens. A ten-second video blows up and you’ve got a ton of free publicity.”

I took a drink of water. “Either way, this is on me. Not you. I made the choice. I deal with the consequences.”

He didn’t look convinced, but he nodded. I tried calling Juno again. The phone rang once before going straight to voicemail. She’d declined the call. That felt worse than if she’d just ignored it.

I sent another text: Please call me.

Even as I typed it, I wasn’t sure how we were going to fix anything. The damage was done. I’d eaten a competitor’s real burger. The timing couldn’t have been worse if I’d planned it.

I opened Twitter and immediately regretted it. The online fans who’d helped build B Well into what it was—the people who’d shared my content, bought my products, defended me when critics said I was just another rich kid playing entrepreneur—they were turning on me.

“Hollis Blackwell is a fraud. Never buying B Well again.”

“Imagine announcing a plant-based burger and then immediately eating beef. The hypocrisy is unreal.”

“Young at Heart must be pissed. They hitched their wagon to this clown.”

I scrolled further, feeling sicker with each comment. They weren’t just coming after me. They were going after Juno and me as a pair, posting screenshots from that makeup video. Some body language expert gave his analysis, creating conspiracy theories about whether our relationship was even real or just a PR stunt.

And Young at Heart was catching the worst of it. People were digging up the rat piss incident, rehashing every misstep the company had made over the past few years, questioning their judgment for partnering with me not once but twice.

Everything we’d built over the last few months was crumbling in real time. My split-second decision could cost Juno the company she dedicated her life to. I understood how important it was to her and why.

I set my phone face down on the desk and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. Could I really lose everything because of a shitty burger and the consequential gut rot that still sat rotting in my gut? The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’d eaten that burger to prove ours was better, and now I might lose the chance to ever bring ours to market.

My stomach churned, though whether from stress or the lingering effects of last night’s poor dietary choice, I couldn’t tell.

“What do we do?” Toby asked quietly.

I dropped my hands and looked at him. “I don’t know. I need to talk to Juno. And Dan. I spent the day with him and I feel like we really connected.”

“And he’s your girlfriend’s father,” he said nonchalantly.

I didn’t have the energy to argue and deny. What was the point? Depending on how this whole disaster shook out, it might be a moot point.

“Yeah,” I muttered.

She might never be mine if I couldn’t fix what I’d broken.

I stood up, unable to sit still any longer. “But I have to try. I can’t just sit here and watch everything fall apart without fighting for it.”