She Signed Up to Win Her Ex, Then Was Paired With Her First Love novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Mr. Danner

Mara meets Keith in the green room and he is ice. He says he joined to save his marriage, and it is clear he knows nothing about Vera and Ashton.

The show put me in a green room with a rack of clothes I hadn't chosen and a woman with a belt of makeup brushes.

"I'm Pia," she said. "I do hair, makeup and ears. Sit."

I sat.

She tilted my chin toward the mirror and went to work with a sponge.

"Ears?" I said.

"Earpieces." She held up a flesh-colored bud the size of a lentil. "The producers talk to you through these. They feed you lines, tell you where to stand and when to cry."

"I'm not going to cry."

"Everybody says that." She smiled at me in the mirror. "You look like you're about to walk into a firing squad. Drink some water."

She was the first person all day who had been kind to me for no reason.

I drank the water.

She pressed the bud into my right ear, tested it with a click, and a flat voice said in my head, "Mic check, Mara."

"Got it," I said.

"Great," said the voice. "Stay seated. Keith Danner is coming in."

My hands went cold.

Pia stepped away from me with a sponge in her hand.

The door opened, and a man came in with his hands in the pockets of a gray sweater.

He was taller than I remembered.

He had grown into his face, and his dark blond hair needed a cut.

He stopped just inside the door and looked at me.

Eleven years of award shows and magazine covers had not prepared me for how much it hurt that his eyes were exactly the same green.

"Mrs. Crewe," Keith Danner said.

His voice was even and polite.

He might have been greeting a stranger in a lobby.

"It's Mara," I said.

"Mara." He said it again, slowly, as if he hadn't said it in a long time.

Pia glanced between us, set the sponge down, and said she'd get coffee.

She shut the door behind her very gently.

We stood there.

I had planned something to say for three days, and every word of it was gone.

"You look well," he said at last.

"So do you."

"I'm told I'm very well." He nodded at the clothes rack. "They have us in matching colors. Apparently that's cute."

"Apparently."

There was a long silence.

Then he looked at the floor.

"I'll be honest," he said. "I read the contract twice. I don't know what you get out of this."

"What do you get out of it?"

"My wife asked me to." He lifted his shoulders. "She said we've been drifting. She said this was a way to fix it with people watching, so we'd have to try."

He said it flatly, like something he had practiced in the car.

"She told me the network paired couples at random," he said. "I'm sure it's a coincidence that it's you."

He looked up as he said that, and there was no coincidence in it.

I opened my mouth.

I could have said that Ashton had chosen him on purpose.

I could have said that his wife was across town at this moment with her hand in my ex-husband's hair.

I looked at the earpiece in the mirror, and I thought of the little red light of a camera in the corner of the room.

"Random," I said.

The door opened again before he could answer.

Vera came in with her arms already open, smelling of vanilla.

"There he is," she said, and kissed Keith on the cheek.

She looked wonderful.

She wore a soft pink dress and her hair fell over one shoulder.

Then she turned to me with her face lit up.

"Mara. I'm so glad you're here. I told Keith you were an angel."

I smiled at her because there was a camera in the corner.

"Be nice to her, okay?" Vera said to Keith, and squeezed his arm. "She's had a rough month."

Keith's mouth went soft, only for a second.

"I'm always nice," he said.

She laughed and slipped back out of the room, and a man in a headset called her name down the hall.

Keith watched the door close.

He looked tired and tender, and he looked like he wanted to believe her.

I watched his face.

I had been braced for his anger, for his coldness and for eleven years of questions.

I had not been braced for this.

He didn't know.

Keith Danner stood in a studio in front of me, wearing a wedding ring, and he had no idea his wife was sleeping with my ex-husband.

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