You Divorced a Genius Heiress novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Face

Desmond came out of the control booth at a walk.

Forty people in headsets watched him cross the studio floor, and nobody said a word.

"That was unwise," he said to me, pleasantly.

"Your feed's black, Des."

"Technical difficulty."

"Mine isn't," said the producer, from behind a camera.

She was a thin woman with a clipboard and the face of someone who had waited ten years to be this rude to a sponsor.

"The web player runs on a separate encoder," she said. "It never dropped. We've had forty thousand viewers for the last ten minutes."

Desmond turned his head.

I watched him do the arithmetic, the way I had watched him do it at a hundred dinners, and I watched it come out wrong.

"Kiera," he said, without looking at her. "Car. Now."

"No," said Kiera.

She was standing at my shoulder with her chin up, and she was shaking so hard her cuff rattled.

"Then you know what happens to your mother's paper," he said.

"I know."

"Good."

He buttoned his jacket and walked out through the loading dock.

A seventy-four-year-old woman in a parked pickup rolled down her window to look at him with great interest.

Kiera slid down the wall of the set to the floor and put her face in her knees.

Odessa drove her to her mother's care home that night and promised to bring her back for breakfast.

By morning my face was everywhere.

It was on the front page of the paper in a rack outside the diner.

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