My Bride Chose Her Publicity Stunt novel · Chapter 5 of 24
Chapter 5: The Garden Hose
The guards dragged me through the lobby by both arms and dropped me in the alley behind the theater.
One of them told me to stay down.
I stood up instead and wiped my hands on my crew pants.
The stage door banged open, and Maura came out at a run with her phone held high.
"Don't look so sad," she said. "Look at this."
"Look at what?"
"The ceiling." She shoved the phone into my hands. "The audience mic runs to the sound board, and the sound board runs to the stream. I patched your wire into the broadcast an hour ago."
The screen showed the live feed.
At the bottom, in white letters, the viewer count said 3.1 million.
The chat was moving too fast to read, but one line kept coming back.
*SHE OWES HIM THREE HUNDRED FORTY THOUSAND???*
"The room laughed," I said.
"The room is eight hundred people. The stream is three million." Maura took the phone back. "Nobody on the stream laughed. They heard her text."
By two in the morning the clip of Lena's text had been shared a quarter of a million times.
By five forty-seven, my mother was calling me.
"Wayne Matthew Burdick," Peggy said, without hello. "Why are nine strangers standing on my lawn?"
"Mom, I'm so sorry."
"One has a camera on a pole. One has a microphone with fuzz on it like a little dead animal." I heard a screen door slam. "One of them stepped on my hydrangeas."
"I'm coming," I said. "Don't talk to them."
"I'm not talking. I'm making coffee. I intend to be very polite about it."
I was on the first flight, and so was Maura.
She had not asked.
She had just been standing in line at the gate when I got there, with a duffel bag and her hair tied back.
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