10/22/2026
💓:I walked into my dying grandmother's birthday party with the richest man in the building on my arm — straight past my ex-fiancé and the cousin who slept in my bed. For the first time in six months, nobody in that room pitied me. 😈
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📕:《FAKE DATING WITH BENEFITS: MY BILLIONAIRE BOSS》
My mother called it wonderful news twice before she said the actual thing. First it was Linda from book club's son, a lawyer back from London, thirty-five, handsome if I do say so myself. Then it was my grandmother turning eighty-seven next week and really wanting me there. And only when I said I wasn't going did my mother put down the armor and tell me the truth.
"Your grandmother has cancer. Advanced stage. The doctors gave her months. This might be her last birthday."
The world stopped. Not dramatically. Just stopped, like something unplugged. 😖
She loves you. She's asked about you every day. Please come. For me. For her.
And I sat in my office with my hand over my mouth doing the arithmetic of a family event, which is a special kind of hell because you can't opt out of blood. Going meant walking into a house where Oliver and Vanessa would be newlyweds, happy, standing in the same hallway as a dying woman, while every relative performed that poor thing face I already get at work every single day. Not going meant spending whatever months she has left explaining to myself why I'd chosen humiliation over her.
So I agreed to go, and then I panicked, because I had no plan for surviving the entrance.
That's what Simon Hart actually sold me. Not s*x, though he added that later like a rider nobody requested. What he sold was an exit from pity. "Just think about it. You're tired of everyone pitying you. I'm rich as f**k, handsome as hell, and charming as f**k. Who's going to feel sorry for you when you show up with Simon Hart on your arm?"
The problem is, he was right. That's the infuriating part. Men like him don't appeal to your hopelessness, they appeal to your arithmetic, and his numbers were impeccable.
Here's what nobody tells you about being the jilted bride in a family that loves an audience: the pity isn't kindness, it's maintenance. It keeps you in your place. Every aunt who touches your arm and says you'll find someone eventually is confirming that you are a project now, not a person. At Thanksgiving I am the cautionary tale. At weddings — I still get invited to weddings, which I have never understood — I am the reminder, the one they seat near the back so nobody has to explain me twice. And at a birthday party for a woman who is dying and asked for me by name, I would have been the tragedy in the corner while the newlyweds cut the cake.
I decided I would rather burn.
The other thing nobody tells you: my mother had already prepared my replacement. She sent me the London lawyer's contact information like it was a coupon. Thirty-five, successful, a lawyer, vaguely familiar with his haircut. She wanted me to go on that interview the way she'd wanted me to marry Oliver — calmly, on schedule, with everyone approving. Instead I showed up with a billionaire who made stock prices jump by walking into a room, and my mother did not ask me a single question about my love life for two days, which I counted as a professional victory and then immediately felt ashamed of counting.
So we built the weekend like a case. We agreed on a number for how long we'd been seeing each other and we never changed it. He learned my coffee order and called it a disaster, which was accurate. He memorized the garden my grandmother planted in 1974 and three facts about my uncle's interest-rate theories. I told him exactly where his hands could go in front of my family and he initialled it like a deliverable. Two events. Some convincing touching. Absolutely zero feelings.
We arrived late on purpose, which was Simon's idea, and it worked like a weapon. ⏱️
The door opened onto a room full of people who had rehearsed their faces, and the rehearsing showed. Because Simon Hart does not walk into a space, he annexes it. Armani immaculate, that dangerous shade of blue eyes sweeping the room like he's assessing property, hand flat and warm at the small of my back, and the entire house doing the same mental recalibration I'd felt in the elevator forty-seven floors above Manhattan every morning: wait, that Jamie? The one who got destroyed? With *him*? 😏
I watched my mother's face go from pity to confusion to something dangerously close to delight.
And then I saw them. 👀
Oliver. In a sweater I picked out two years ago, holding Vanessa's waist at the drink table, both of them relaxed in a way that meant they'd done this many times in the six months since my bedroom became their origin story. My cousin wearing my tiara's leftovers — the earrings, at least, I noticed that, I noticed everything, that's what ten years does to a woman's eye for detail. They turned. They saw us. And the little performance of surprise they attempted was so bad I had to physically stop myself from critiquing it like opposing counsel.
Simon leaned down, close enough that only I got it, and murmured, "Counselor. Smile. You're winning."
So I smiled. God help me, I smiled with my whole face.
What followed was the best and worst weekend of my adult life, and I mean that literally, because my grandmother took my hand in the garden — the garden she planted in 1974, which Simon knew about because he'd done his homework — and looked at him for a long moment, and something in her expression eased.
"He's rude," she said, about my ex, in front of my ex, using the volume of a woman who has survived eighty-seven years and stopped caring about seating arrangements. "You deserve someone rude in a better direction."
My grandmother was dying. Doctors gave her months. And she used one of her remaining good hours to insult a neurosurgeon within earshot, on behalf of me, and I laughed until I couldn't breathe, and then I cried in the bathroom, and then I came back out and ate cake, because that's what you do when it might be the last birthday. 🎂
Simon was magnificent all weekend. Charming as advertised, generous with his attention in front of an audience, disciplined after — never calling, never asking about my day, treating the whole arrangement like the closed contract it was. He asked my aunts questions and remembered their answers. He let my uncle lecture him about interest rates for eleven minutes without checking his watch once, which is more patience than Oliver ever mustered at this same table across ten years. He put his hand on the back of my grandmother's chair during dinner and made her laugh twice, and each time I felt ten years of weight leave my shoulders, because for one weekend nobody in that room pitied Jamie Collins. They looked at me with something far more useful. Curiosity. Envy, even. 😈
And I hated how much it fed me. That's the confession. Six months of disappearing off the face of the earth — coming in early, leaving late, eating at my desk, becoming the precision machine again so people would forget my name — and here I was, drunk on being envied by women who'd brought casseroles to my pity. If that's what healing looks like from the inside, it looks a lot like sin. 🥂
Vanessa tried the soft voice on me over dessert. Sweetheart, we never meant — and Simon didn't raise his voice or threaten anything. He just put his hand on mine, in full view of the table, and asked my grandmother about the roses, and my cousin disappeared out of the conversation entirely. It was the closest thing to revenge I've ever been handed and it cost me nothing but a lie.
Oliver lasted until the coffee. He came over with his jaw set, ready to be the reasonable ex, the man who wanted me to be happy, and he got to say approximately four words before Simon turned those blue eyes on him and introduced himself in the flat, courteous tone that has ended acquisitions. My ex-fiancé walked away holding his own mug like a man who'd just been told he wasn't in the deal anymore. Ten years and he couldn't survive ninety seconds of a stranger's politeness. Which told me everything about what I'd almost lost, delivered three days before it mattered.
Which is when I learned the real danger of borrowing a man like Simon Hart.
Not the pity. The pity was gone, harvested, delivered somewhere else. The danger was that on Sunday night, standing on the porch while everyone pretended to say goodbye inside, my grandmother pressed my hand and said quietly, "You look less sad than you did at Christmas. Don't waste that on a costume."
Don't waste that on a costume.
Eighty-seven years of marriage advice compressed into seven words, aimed directly at the clause we'd written to protect ourselves. Absolutely zero feelings. No-strings s*x. No jealousy. No expectations. Just s*x. It was supposed to be simple. Two events. Some convincing touching.
And it worked perfectly. Right up until everything went completely off the rails. 🌪️
Because Monday morning I came back to the office early, before anyone could look at me, and found a handkerchief embroidered S.H. in my drawer that I had not returned, and I realized I'd spent the entire birthday weekend watching my own boss perform devotion and cataloguing which parts of it felt real. And my phone buzzed with a message from him about the Cavellier amendment, and I read past the amendment three times looking for something that wasn't there, and there it was: the first crack in a contract neither of us had broken yet.
He needed a serious girlfriend to prove New York he'd settled down. I needed armor for a funeral that hadn't happened yet.
Neither of us mentioned that my grandmother's question had an answer I didn't want to write down: if the costume stops feeling like the costume, who's actually pretending? 💔
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