The coffee in my hand had gone cold an hour ago, but I kept holding it anyway, staring at the architectural blueprints spread across my cramped desk. My phone buzzed—another notification I'd ignore. Probably my mom asking when I'd visit for dinner, or my buddy Marcus trying to drag me out for drinks. Thursday nights at Romano's, same as always. I was about to finally take a sip of that terrible cold coffee when she walked through the door of Chen & Associates Architecture Firm. Emma Chen. Ten years. Ten goddamn years, and she looked like she'd stepped out of a fashion magazine. Her black hair, once wild and always escaping from messy ponytails during our high school days, now fell in perfect waves past her shoulders. She wore a charcoal suit that probably cost more than my monthly rent, and heels that clicked with purpose across the worn linoleum floor. The coffee cup slipped from my fingers, splashing brown liquid across the blueprints I'd been working on for three days. "Shit," I muttered, grabbing napkins and dabbing frantically at the designs. "Jake Morrison." Her voice hit me like a physical force. Still that same slight rasp, the one that used to whisper promises under the stars at Miller's Point. "I was hoping I'd find you here." I looked up slowly, giving myself time to school my expression into something neutral. Professional. Like my heart wasn't trying to jackhammer its way out of my chest. "Emma." Her name felt foreign on my tongue after so many years of not saying it. "What are you doing here?" She glanced around the small office—really more of a glorified storage room with a desk—and something flickered across her face. Pity? Disappointment? I couldn't tell anymore. I used to be able to read every micro-expression, every tiny shift in her mood. Now she was a stranger in a designer suit. "I need to talk to you. Privately." She nodded toward the door leading to the conference room. "Do you have a few minutes?" "I'm working," I said, still dabbing at the blueprints even though they were clearly ruined. Fifteen hours of work down the drain. Seemed fitting, somehow. "Jake." She stepped closer, and I caught a hint of her perfume. Something expensive and sophisticated, nothing like the vanilla body spray she used to wear. "Please. It's important." Against every instinct screaming at me to tell her to leave, to protect whatever was left of my pride, I stood up. "Fine. Five minutes." The conference room was barely bigger than my office space, with a table that seated six uncomfortably and a window overlooking the parking lot. Emma closed the door behind us, and suddenly the room felt about half its already-small size. She didn't sit. Instead, she stood by the window, her back to me for a long moment. When she finally turned around, her composure had cracked just slightly. I could see the tension in her shoulders, the way her fingers worried at the edge of her suit jacket. "I need a favor," she said. I laughed. Actually laughed. "You disappear for ten years without a word—no goodbye, no explanation, nothing—and you show up asking for a favor?" "I know." Her voice was quiet. "I know I have no right." "You're damn right you have no right." The anger I'd buried for a decade started bubbling up. "We had plans, Emma. College together. That apartment we were going to rent. You said you loved me." "I did love you." "Past tense. Got it." I moved toward the door. "If that's all—" "I need you to pretend to be my fiancé." I froze with my hand on the doorknob. Slowly, I turned back to face her. "What?" Emma took a breath, and I watched her slip back into that composed, CEO version of herself. "I'm the head of Chen Industries now. You might have seen the news—we're the fastest-growing tech company in the region. But my grandmother, who controls the board, refuses to approve our biggest acquisition unless I'm settled down. Married, or at least engaged." "So buy a ring and make something up." "She wants to meet him. Have dinner with him. She's... thorough." Emma's jaw tightened. "I need someone I can trust to pull this off convincingly. Someone who knows me well enough to make it believable." "Someone you can manipulate, you mean." The words came out harsher than I intended, but I didn't take them back. She flinched. Good. Let her feel a fraction of what I felt that morning when I woke up to find her gone, her phone disconnected, her parents' house empty, like the Chen family had been erased from existence overnight. "I'll pay you," she said. "Two hundred thousand dollars for three months. That's all I need—just enough time to finalize the deal and satisfy my grandmother's concerns. Then we can stage a quiet breakup, and you'll never have to see me again." Two hundred thousand dollars. That was... that was enough to start my own firm. To stop working in this closet for my uncle, designing strip mall renovations when I should be creating something meaningful. It was every dream I'd had to put on hold after Emma left and I couldn't afford the architecture program at State. "Why me?" I asked. "You're rich now. Successful. You could have anyone." "Because you're the only person I ever really loved, Jake. And I think—I hope—that might still show enough to convince my grandmother." She met my eyes, and for just a second, I saw the girl I used to know. The one who'd sit on my truck's tailgate, eating gas station candy and planning our future. "Plus, you're an architect. Respectable career, good family name in this town. You're exactly the kind of man she'd approve of." "Except I'm not actually an architect yet. I'm a draftsman in my uncle's firm, working on my license." "You will be." She said it with such certainty. "You were always going to be brilliant, Jake. I never doubted that." The words hit harder than they should have. I wanted to stay angry, to hold onto the hurt. But two hundred thousand dollars. My own firm. Everything I'd sacrificed. "I need time to think about it," I said. "I need an answer by tomorrow." Emma pulled a business card from her purse—heavy cardstock with embossed lettering. "That's my direct line. Call me by noon." She walked to the door, then paused with her hand on the handle. "For what it's worth, Jake, leaving you was the hardest thing I've ever done. And not a day has gone by that I haven't thought about you." Then she was gone, leaving only the faint trace of expensive perfume and the ruins of my carefully constructed life of forgetting her. I stood in that conference room for twenty minutes, staring at her business card. Emma Chen, CEO, Chen Industries. The girl who used to steal her dad's car so we could drive to the beach at midnight had become this. And she wanted me to pretend to love her. The twisted thing was, I wasn't sure how much pretending it would take.