Chapter Fifty-Five
- Eight hours before -
Miranda
“Randi, hold up!” Cam, my assistant, called as he ran down the aisles of desks in the office, his new leather shoes creaking a bit with each step.
Cam and I had a horrendous shoe-shopping habit.
We were good for each other in most ways, but not that.
If we were on the way back from a meeting or a lunch, and I just needed to “pop in” to the store, we both knew we were going to be trying on damn near every pair of shoes the place had to offer.
And buying way more than was reasonable.
I’d been with him when he’d bought those woven leather, flat heel, round moc toe, notched vamp, penny loafers with the strap in the color cognac that he had on.
Magnanni.
Eight-hundred-fifty dollars.
The Cam who’d walked into my office three years before dreamed of shoes like that, but was forced to wear ones he’d thrifted and tried his best to repair and keep in good condition.
He could afford them now because, quite frankly, I couldn’t function without Cam in my life. I wasn’t sure how I’d managed to keep everything from falling apart before him.
I mean, there had been other assistants. Almost a dozen of them, to be exact. Each of them wholly… fine. None of them, though, capable of anticipating my needs, of handling situations in the exact manner I would handle them, so I didn’t need to micromanage or breathe down his neck.
And, sure, it helped that he was happy to spend a huge chunk of his time with me, pulling late nights and obnoxiously early mornings, though I didn’t exactly require it of him.
That said, he got paid an ostentatious salary for a personal assistant because he was happy to be there even without me demanding it of him.
I could afford it.
I wouldn’t miss the extra hundred thousand more he made than the average personal assistant.
That was why I needed him so badly.
When you ran your own multi-billion-dollar company, you didn’t quibble over money you needed to spend to make it operate as efficiently as possible.
“What’s up?” I asked as we both stepped into the elevator and I slipped my foot out of my heel and flexed it a few times in the air.
“Did I not tell you that the scalloped sides look sexy as fuck but would make you crunch your toes all day to hold them on?” he asked, clucking his tongue at me. “Those are sit-down-shoes. And you are always on the move.”
He wasn’t wrong.
“I’d mistakenly thought today was going to be a behind-the-desk sort of day,” I told him, trying to hold back a grumble as I slipped my foot back into my shoe as the elevator chimed.
“When do you ever spend the whole day behind a desk?” he asked as he checked his little clipboard that had a compartment for storing papers.
I’d never seen one before in the office, which meant when he’d shown up with one on his first day as my assistant, he’d brought it with him, knowing he would need it.
That was the kind of attention to detail that made me immediately know he was a keeper.
“Okay, so, I handled that little shitstorm the girls on the second floor created,” he said, meaning that one of them had been trash-talking another one on the employee chat and it had accidentally gotten out and created absolute chaos.
“Let’s just say that we will not have to worry about bullshit like that again. ”
Cam emanated Golden Retriever Energy most of the time. He was upbeat, energetic, outgoing, and friendly. But, man, if you pissed him off, the man could slice your flesh off your bones with just a glare.
It was hard to believe if you looked at him with his golden-brown hair and his big blue eyes, his handsome face that wasn’t too handsome, his tall and lean body clad in meticulously thought-out outfits.
But if he said that he’d scared the bejesus into the girls on the second floor, then I believed him.
“Thank you. You’re amazing,” I said. “But—“
“But we still need to bring in Gabby to do a lecture about company morale and appropriate topics of discussion in the workplace,” Cam finished for me.
“I think, when I was born, they took a chunk of my brain out and put it in your head,” I told him, shaking my head. It was almost eerie how in tune we were at times.
“Girl, I wish. Maybe I’d be a kajillionaire too. Keeping my own personal hoard of sugar babies on my fancy yacht as they filled endless champagne coupes full of the finest bubbly.”
“You get seasick,” I reminded him. “And carbonation makes you burpy,” I added.
“Don’t ruin my fantasy.”
“And you love your boyfriend,” I reminded him.
“I do,” he said, his face softening at the mention of the man I kept him away from far too often.
“Anyway, I was able to move around your appointments for the morning, so you could squeeze in that check-up you have been putting off for seven months now,” he said, giving me a disapproving raised-brow look.
“I hate the doctor,” I grumbled, sounding petulant but unable to help it.
“Believe me, I know. I’ve rescheduled this four times already. I’ve never met someone who will happily go to their dental appointments without so much as a whine, but put off their annual check-up like this.”
“Cam, I love you. But there is one way in which you have a privilege that I don’t,” I told him, shrugging.
To that, his brows lowered as he looked at me. “I’ve never known you to be anything but absolutely fucking in love with yourself. Including your body,” he said, shaking his head.
He wasn’t wrong.
It had taken me a long time—my whole damn life, really—to accept that I was never going to be one of the skinny girls, that I wasn’t built that way, that no matter how disordered my eating was, my body chose to hold onto some extra padding.
But I did accept that.
And I did love my body.
That being said, not everyone did.
“I do. But I can’t even begin to explain how quickly a doctor telling me about my BMI being unhealthy undoes years of self-love.”
“BMI is complete and utter bullshit. It was created by a mathematician, not a physician,” he ranted, clearly agitated. “And it was only ever used for male bodies. It doesn’t take into account the tits and ass and hips women have.”
“You know that, and I know that, but the entire medical field seems to be completely oblivious to that. And I just don’t want to hear that shit again, so I’d rather just skip the visit.”
To that, Cam let out a deep sigh.
“Okay. Listen. I will cancel it one last time. And I will do some heavy research to find you a doctor who isn’t going to say stupid crap like that. Then will you go?”
“I guess if you can find that unicorn doctor, yes.”
“Okay. Good. Then I am keeping you from your bathtub and Chinese for no good reason.”
“And I’m keeping you from that yummy boyfriend of yours.
Get home. I’ll see you in the morning,” I told him, not knowing then that I wouldn’t, that by morning I would be in a hospital room, hooked up to machines, being given harsh looks from everyone who passed me by, with absolutely no idea what the hell had happened to me.
All I remembered was getting in my town car, then going to my apartment.
I had vague flashes of running my bathtub, of letting a bottle of red breathe on the kitchen counter, then of hearing the doorbell.
Chinese, probably.
I was a creature of habit that way.
Mondays through Wednesdays, it was always something healthy. Sushi, salads, the trendy new vegan place a few blocks away.
Then on Thursdays, it was Chinese, my guilty pleasure. Because nothing could help me push through one more day of the workweek like a massive serving of lo mein, a hot bath, and a glass or two of good red wine.
In my mind, I could see myself walking to the door.
After that, though, it was all just… gone.
I had nothing else.
Nothing but a nearly fatal dose of drugs in my system and a gash across my wrist under several layers of gauze.
I was not suicidal.
I didn’t care what the hell the doctors were saying.
I had a beautiful life.
Charmed, even.
I lived a charmed life.
And I got it. There was a precedent for rich, successful people who had everything the world had to offer who were hiding behind a happy veneer and ended up taking their own lives.
It happened.
Maybe it even happened often enough for them not to take me at my word when things looked so definitive.
But I would never, ever take my own life.
It didn’t matter what happened, what you told me, how you might have ruined my life.
See, they couldn’t know this, wouldn’t even care if I told them, but my best friend in high school had taken her own life in her college dorm during our freshmen year.
I’d never known grief like that before or after.
To this very day, I caught myself wanting to call her and tell her something, to laugh over ice cream or go take a rain walk to “soothe our souls.”
I never wanted anyone else to feel that loss like I had to. Not if I could help it anyway.
I simply… wouldn’t do it.
I wouldn’t attempt it.
Nothing.
I had no freaking idea what had actually happened, but I had to find out.
In seventy-two hours, apparently.
I couldn’t even begin to explain how utterly impossible it was for me to disappear for three days.
And if it ever got out that I’d been committed against my will?
“Shit,” I hissed, running a hand over my face.
I needed help.
But my purse and phone were nowhere to be found.
And pretty soon, I knew what was going to happen.
I was going to be stripped and have no access to anyone but the psych ward staff for three days.
Casting a glance around, I noticed that one of the ladies who was assigned to watch us “crazy people” was occupied with something on her phone.
I reached my hand under the sheet, finding my smartwatch still on my wrist.
I had one contact linked to it.
Cam.
Taking a deep breath, I did my best to shoot out the message without looking too much.
Help. 5150. Didn’t do it.
That was the best I could manage before the woman looked in my direction again.
If there was anyone in the world who could help me, it was Cam.
He would knock on the door of every lawyer, every judge, every single person who could try to get me out of this situation.
I just had to give him a little time.
Until then, I was going to need to do my best to come off as, well, sane.
Because that was exactly what I was. Even if the situation was crazy. Even if I felt like I was losing a bit of my grip on reality since there were blanks in my memory, since I knew I didn’t drug myself or slice my wrist.
So what happened?
Was that not the Chinese at the door?
If not, who was it?
What did they have against me?
Was I supposed to actually… die?
Who would that help?
“Miss Coulter?” the doctor asked, coming in.
And so it begins…
Whether I liked it or not, whether I needed it or not, it looked like I was going to the mental institution.