19. Millie
MILLIE
Mama's apartment smells like home the second I walk through the door. Garlic and tomato, chicken browning in oil, the rice cooker clicking on the counter. She's at the stove with her back to me, stirring something in the cast iron, and when she hears me come in she doesn't turn around.
"Take your shoes off," she says. "And wash your hands. You're helping."
I kick off my boots and leave them by the door, shrug out of my coat. The apartment is warm, almost too warm, the radiator hissing in the corner like it always does when the building superintendent finally remembers to turn on the heat.
"What are we making?"
"Chicken, rice, beans. What else would we be making?"
I move to the sink and wash my hands with the bar soap. She then hands me a cutting board and a knife without looking up from the stove.
"Onions. Small dice."
I start cutting. We work in silence for a while, the only sounds the sizzle of chicken and the rhythmic thunk of my knife against the board. Mom moves around the kitchen with ease, adding spices to the beans, checking the rice, adjusting the heat under the chicken.
"You're quiet," she says after ten minutes.
"I'm always quiet."
"Not like this. Seems like you're thinking too hard about something you don't want to talk about." She glances over her shoulder at me. "How's Duncan?"
My knife slips slightly. I catch it before it slides off the onion. "Fine. Why?"
"Because you're married to him and you haven't mentioned his name once since you walked in." She turns down the heat under the beans. "That's either very good or very bad."
I don't answer, just keep cutting. The onions are making my eyes water, which is convenient because it gives me an excuse for the burning sensation building behind them.
Mama wipes her hands on a dish towel and comes to stand next to me. She takes the knife gently and sets it down, then turns me to face her.
"Baby, talk to me."
"There's nothing to talk about."
"Don't lie to your mother. I can see it all over your face." She cups my chin, tilts my head up so I have to meet her eyes. "What's going on?"
The words leave my lips before I can stop them. "I think I'm in love with him. And I don't know what to do about it."
Mama's face softens. She pulls me into a hug that smells like cooking oil and the lotion she's used since I was little. I let myself sink into it for a moment, my forehead pressed against her shoulder.
"Why is that a problem?" she asks quietly.
"This was supposed to be temporary, just long enough to get through Oscar season and fix his image. Then we split and everyone moves on, but now it feels real, and that terrifies me because what if I let myself believe it and he decides I'm not worth staying for?"
Mama pulls back and looks at me with the face she uses when she's about to say something I won't like. "Millie Harris, you are the smartest, most talented person I know. But sometimes you are also the most stubborn. That man is in love with you. Anyone with eyes can see it."
"He's performing."
"Baby, I've watched you perform for years. I know what it looks like when someone's acting." She goes back to the stove and starts turning the chicken. "And that man is not acting when he's around you."
I pick up the knife again and finish the onions because I need something to do with my hands. Mama adds them to the pot with the beans, stirring slowly while the steam rises between us.
"What if I let him in and it doesn't work?" I ask. "What if we try this for real and three months from now he realizes I'm too difficult or too guarded or too much work?"
"Then you'll survive it the way you've survived everything else." She adds salt to the beans, tastes them with a spoon, adds more. "But what if it does work? What if you let yourself have something good instead of assuming it's going to disappear?"
We finish cooking in silence. Mama plates the chicken and rice, ladles beans into a bowl, sets everything on the small table near the window. I sit across from her and we eat, the food as good as I remember, maybe better.
Halfway through dinner, my phone buzzes on the table. I ignore it. It buzzes again. And again.
Mama nods toward it. "You should check that."
I pick up the phone and see seventeen notifications, all from the last five minutes. Twitter alerts, text messages from LaToya, a missed call from Brianna. My stomach drops before I even open the first one.
The trending topic is #MillieDuncanExposed.
I click through to Twitter and the first video that loads is shaky footage from someone's phone.
Duncan at his work party last week, standing near the windows with a colleague.
The audio is muffled but clear enough to make out Duncan saying: "She's pulling away.
Setting up the divorce before we're even two weeks into the marriage. "
Tobias responds with something I can't hear, and then Duncan again, louder this time: "She's made it clear she wants the clean break we agreed to. And I'm the idiot who fell in love anyway."
The video cuts off.
The caption underneath reads: "Duncan Ellington caught on camera admitting his marriage to Millie Harris was arranged and she's already planning the divorce. Full thread below."
I scroll through the thread with hands that have started shaking. Screenshots of our contract terms—how someone got those I don't know, but they're there. Six months, public appearances, a fake engagement announced at the Met.
Everything. They have everything.
My phone starts ringing. LaToya. I let it go to voicemail.
It rings again immediately. Brianna this time. I decline the call.
Mama is watching me from across the table. "Millie? What is it?"
I can't speak. Can't move. I just sit there staring at my phone as the notifications keep pouring in, hundreds of them now, thousands.
The video has been retweeted forty thousand times in five minutes.
People are calling us liars, saying we manipulated the public, that I used Duncan for Oscar votes and he used me to save his reputation.
They're not wrong.
Except they are, because somewhere between the contract signing and now, it stopped being fake. At least for me. And apparently for him too, based on what he said in that video.
But none of that matters now because the entire world thinks we lied to them. Which we did.