Chase was already at the table when she arrived. He stood and they hugged tightly.
“I missed you,” Mara said into his shoulder.
“I missed you too. You look incredible.”
She laughed. Between spending the night with Derek and having Pan back, she felt like her entire net worth. “Thanks.”
“I suppose Mr Football is to blame?”
“Maybe…”
A smile played at the corners of Chase’s mouth. “Well, I’m glad you’re happy. And I’m sorry for putting so much pressure on you. I know you didn’t start HFA to be a public figure. I should have respected that.”
“No, I’m sorry.” Mara took his hand. “You’re trying to do what’s right for the company. I should have explained myself better.”
“No, you shouldn’t. That’s why you’re the CEO. Here.” Chase walked around the table and pulled her chair out. Mara sat, so grateful and relieved, she could have cried. And she made up her mind to tell Chase the truth. Unfortunately, the waiter came rushing forward and she held her tongue until they had placed their drink orders—a glass of Pinot for her, black coffee for Chase.
“So, what have you been up to? Besides banging Mr Football,” Chase asked.
“Never mind that.” She tapped Chase’s phone. “Google ‘Marie Kennedy.’”
“Why?”
“Just do it. Google her.”
Mara waited, her heart hammering as Chase tapped her old name into his phone. She watched him squint, saw his finger swiping sideways, no doubt scrolling through Google images of her face. The seconds ticked by and his eyes grew wider and wider. Mara seized a paper napkin from the table and tore off a corner. “So, you get me a little more now. Right?”
Chase’s gaze shifted to her, down to his phone, then back to her face. “You’re Marie Kennedy?”
“Um, kind of?”
“You were…what? A socialite?”
“I guess that that’s the word for rich people who party for a living.”
“And your real name’s ‘Marie?’”
“No, it’s Mara. I called myself Marie while I was in Europe.”
“And you were in Europe for…?”
“Most of my twenties.”
Chase’s face crumpled as he sat in his chair. “Mara, I love you, but this is all too much.”
“That’s fair.”
The waiter returned with their drinks. “Anything else?”
“Yeah, I’ll have a beer,” Chase said, his gaze locked on her. “How do you keep doing this to me?”
“Doing what?”
“Coming out with all this insane shit?”
“Sorry. Although if you think about it in context, it’s only like two or three insane things over a whole lifetime.”
Chase looked up at the ceiling. “Mmm, if you say so.”
“I can explain! And I think once I do, you’ll get why I don’t want to be the face of HFA. You know how I got rich unexpectedly?”
“Yes. That I know. Does it have anything to do with Marie Kennedy?”
“No.”
He gave her a tortured look.
“We’ll get there, don’t worry. All you need to know right now is I got rich in 2013 and ran far, far away from Albury.”
“And it was legal, right? How you got rich?”
“Definitely.”
Chase’s beer appeared in a glass the size of Mara’s head. He took a big drink and waved a hand. “Go on.”
“So, I flew to Western Australia and checked into a hotel in Perth to try to figure out what to do.”
She could almost see herself wandering around the city, her ears newly pinned, carrying her first Chanel bag like it was made of glass. She’d ordered it through squinted eyes, sure at any moment the cops would burst in and snatch her bank card away.
“You were on your own?” Chase asked.
“Yeah, and I had no idea what to do with my money, so I went to see a financial advisor.”
“That’s a good move.”
She raised a, ‘please wait’ finger. “I told her I was an orphan and I’d come into some money and asked her to help me grow it.”
“Smart.”
“Then I hired another financial advisor.”
“You had two financial advisors?”
“I had ten.”
Chase choked on his beer. Dabbing his mouth with a napkin, he gaped at her. “Why!?”
“Because I didn’t want any of them to know how much money I had and try to screw me over. I figured they’d do a better job if they thought I was a mid-range client.”
“That’s… pretty smart. They didn’t find out about each other?”
“Some of them knew, but that wasn’t the problem—I wasn’t looking over what they were doing. They’d send me emails and I’d never read them because I was in Europe being Marie Kennedy.”
“Where were you living exactly?”
“London. Budapest for a while. Croatia. Anywhere insufferable rich kids roam. I had this Instagram account, BlissAndGlow.”
He frowned. “Why does that sound familiar?”
“It was pretty huge. I had a blue check. And nine million followers.”
Chase clapped his hand to his mouth.
“I didn’t post a lot of pictures of myself. But I posted a picture of the parties I threw and the people that were there.”
“Yes! Like the food and decorations and people’s shoes and stuff?”
She smiled sadly. “That was me.”
Chase gaped at her. “I followed that account. How was that you?”
“I was rich. I was young—I had nothing better to do.”
“God, this is like when you find out Mick Jagger is singing backup on ‘You’re So Vain.’ No, I’m wrong. Your house and your clothes. All the food. You’re so BlissAndGlow. I can’t believe I’m friends with a celebrity!”
“Former, very minor, celebrity.”
“Right. So why did you stop?”
“I couldn’t keep it up. I wanted to be this…curator of beautiful things, but all the parties got overwhelming. And I wasn’t being myself. I was going by a fake name and lying about where I was from and what I was doing all the time. It was too much.”
“So, you came back to Melbourne?”
“Yeah, I wanted a home.”
Chase took another long drink of beer. “Okay, putting a huge pin in the BlissAndGlow thing. Is this why you don’t want to front HFA? Because you don’t want people to know you were an influencer?”
“No.”
“Then, why…?”
Mara hesitated. She wanted to be honest, but she couldn’t tell him everything. Not all at once. She moved her fork a millimetre to the right so that it perfectly balanced the knife on her left. “I can’t go into everything but when I came home, I went through my finances and saw one of my advisors invested almost everything I gave him in real estate. I’d told him I didn’t want to be a landlord, but I owned thirty-three shitty townhouses, all negative geared and paying themselves off while the people living in them paid hand over fist.”
Chase’s face contracted. “Mara, that wasn’t—”
“Don’t say it wasn’t my fault! It was! I was privileged and careless and I spent eight years being a slumlord.”
“You weren’t! You were… bankrolling a financial advisor who made you a slumlord.”
“Big difference.”
“It is.” He ran his tongue over his teeth. “Do you still… own the houses?”
“No! I offered them to the people living in them for ten thousand dollars each.”
Chase threw back his head and laughed. “That’s amazing!”
“No, it isn’t! It’s embarrassing!”
“You changed people’s lives. Do you have any idea how good that would look on a press release? ‘Beautiful millionaire has change of heart and dedicates herself to helping the less fortunate.’”
Mara’s stomach sank. She was hoping the story would bring Chase over to her side—not give him more encouragement. “I screwed up then backpedaled after years of profiting from it. That isn’t a story people want.”
Chase flipped a hand. “God, you’re hard on yourself. Fine, it started that way. But personally, I couldn’t think of better publicity.”
“Do you remember when you came in for your job interview and I asked you if you’d rather be rich or famous?”
Chase smiled. “I thought you were coconuts.”
“But you answered the question. What was your reason again?”
He looked skyward. “I think I said something like ‘only insecure people want to be famous.’”
“You did. You also said they needed to get a therapist.”
“That was bitchy of me.”
“No. It was perfect. As soon as you said it, I knew I wanted you for the job.” She took Chase’s hand. “My love, I don’t want to be famous. I’ve been semi-famous, and it was a drag. All I want is to be happy, and help people in the specific way I’ve chosen.”
Chase sighed. “Fine, I accept you won’t be the face of HFA.”
“Good.”
“But we need to find another ambassador.”
“Fine by me.”
“And I get to tell Andy you ran BlissAndGlow, Marie. He said years ago he thought he recognised you and I told him he was an idiot.”
“Oh, poor Andy. You can do that.”
They smiled at each other, and the waiter, sensing a gap in the conversation, zoomed forward to take their order. Mara chose pumpkin risotto, Chase got a burger, and as they chatted, Mara found the knots that had taken permanent residence in her stomach over the past few weeks had dissolved.
“Maybe we can get Nicole Kidman or a Hemsworth brother to be our representative?” Chase mused. “Did you meet any of them in your rich girl travels?”
“I went on a group dinner with Liam once. We barely talked though.”
Chase’s mouth dropped open. “Holy fucking—”
His phone lit up on the table. “Shit, it’s the office.”
“Go ahead.”
“Thirty seconds,” he warned her. “Thirty seconds and then you tell me all about Chris Hemsworth.”
“It was Liam and we barely talked!”
Mara studied the restaurant as Chase barked into his phone. It was a nice place, kind of sailor-themed. Maybe for her next dinner party, she could—
Chase tugged at her arm. “Mara!”
“What? What is it?”
His nostrils flared like an angry horse. “How much do you not want to be famous?”
“Um, why?”
“Because you might not be the face of HFA, but you’re definitely going to be the face of Derek Hardiman’s cock.”