Instead I had a big fat nothing.
No job, no fiancé, nothing.
I went into the kitchen, surrounded by the catering staff my mother had hired. Nobody tried to talk to me, and I liked being anonymous and ignored. Nobody to ask me if I was excited about tomorrow, nobody making innuendoes about the honeymoon, nobody telling me how lucky I was to be marrying Sterling.
I didn’t want to be surrounded by my loved ones, standing alongside the man I was supposed to marry, because I realized that the only man I had ever truly loved was Dante.
Dante, who didn’t come for me. Dante, who had cheated on me. Dante, who could never be the man I needed him to be.
The doorbell rang again, and I heard my mother calling my name. I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to stand around talking to people and pretending like my life wasn’t in shambles.
“Lemon!” she said as she came into the kitchen, looking very bewildered. “There’s someone at the front door to see you.”
It was him. He had finally come.
Chapter 26
Sometimes I think it would be the best thing in the world to be someone’s favorite hello and hardest good-bye.
Heart in my throat, I followed my mother. What would I do when I saw him? Should I tell him to leave? That I didn’t want to hear any more of his lies?
Some part of my heart pleaded with me to listen.
But it wasn’t Dante standing in the foyer.
It was Taylor. “Can we talk? Privately?”
I led her into my father’s study and closed the pocket doors behind us.
“Is that your rehearsal dinner?” she asked, sitting down on the brown leather sofa. She started chewing the end of her fingernails. I sat in my father’s favorite armchair, facing her.
“It is.” What was she doing here? Did she think she was going to convince me to come back to film the finale?
That would not happen.
“So you’re still getting married tomorrow?”
“Not that it is any of your business, but no, I’m not.”
She leaned forward. “Because you’re in love with Dante.”
I could feel a massive headache coming on, and I pinched the bridge of my nose. “What do you want, Taylor?”
It was then that I noticed the clear case she had in her hands, small and thin. It was a DVD. “This is the whole show, with some unedited parts at the end of the finale. You need to watch it. It will explain everything. I wanted to e-mail it to you, but I still had your phone and I didn’t know if you’d check your computer.”
The finale wasn’t scheduled to be filmed until tomorrow. They had filmed it early? Why?
She pulled my cell phone out of her pocket and handed both items to me. There were like a billion missed calls and texts, most of them from Kat and Dante. I turned my phone off and put the DVD down.
“You have to watch it. Because Rafe was telling the truth. That was not Dante. Dante was outside in the gazebo waiting for you, and you interrupted Rafe and Genesis.”
Now he had Taylor doing his dirty work? I ignored the piece of my heart that leapt with hope. I knew better. “Did he send you here to lie to me?”
“I have no reason to lie to you. That’s why I brought the DVD. So you could see that both men were on the show, and have been from the very beginning. It’s another twist. Matthew felt that the show had become too predictable, and that blogger, Reality Joe, keeps spoiling who the winner will be every season, so we played everything very close to the vest to keep it from getting out. It’s why we broadcast the show early, too.”
I looked at the silver disc. She said it would prove that I had found Rafe, not Dante. “Why didn’t Dante tell me?”
Now she looked uncomfortable and chewed on her nails again. “He might have been under the impression that you already knew.”
“And who gave him that impression?”
“I did,” she confessed. “When it became clear that you were the favorite of both the audience and Dante, they wanted you to be surprised too. They also liked the tension between you and Genesis, where you guys were trying to be friends, but you thought you were both falling in love with the same man. Only that wasn’t how we wanted you to find out. You caused total chaos when you walked into that house and went upstairs. Not only because we wanted to film everything, but because you were about to ruin the surprise and we knew it would not be good.”