The Two-Million Dollar Fake Fiancée

Maya POV:

A screech of worn tires cut through the dull hum of Manhattan traffic. In under twenty minutes, Zoe's bright blue Fiat 500 slammed into the curb, wedged crookedly against my rear bumper.

The driver's door flew open. Before I could even reach for my handle, Zoe yanked my door wide, reached in, and hauled me into a fierce, bone-cracking hug.

I buried my face into the crook of her neck. The familiar smell washed over me, finally coaxing the suffocating knot in my chest to loosen just a fraction.

"Breathe, Maya," she murmured against my hair. "I've got you."

When she finally pulled back, her fiery red pixie cut caught the glare of the streetlights, framing a pair of vibrant green eyes that were usually bright with mischief. Right now, they held nothing but raw, unfiltered worry. She wiped a rogue tear from my cheek with the sleeve of her oversized denim jacket, searching my face. "Talk to me. Every single bloody detail."

My voice came out raspy, hitching on the sharp edges of my pride as I spilled everything: Julian's icy smear campaign, Felix's cowardly ambush in the glass-walled boardroom, and the calculated bluff that had miraculously wrangled me six months of severance pay.

Zoe's face cycled through a masterclass of expressions. First came pure, volcanic fury—she cursed Julian and Felix with a string of creative, anatomically impossible profanities that would have made a sailor blush.

A bitter, dry laugh escaped me. I shook my head, staring at the worn steering wheel. "It's a band-aid on a bullet wound, Zoe. Six months goes by in a heartbeat. And after that? What do I do about Mom?"

The celebration evaporated. Zoe's posture softened into a heavy, somber stillness. She knew the reality better than anyone. Battling lupus for the past five years had made her painfully intimate with the cruelty of American healthcare—the astronomical copays, the relentless denial letters, the sheer exhaustion of having a body that actively betrayed you. Even now, despite her fierce facade, the faint, persistent flush of a low-grade fever dusted her cheeks, and the subtle slump of her shoulders betrayed the chronic fatigue she masked so well.

She took both of my icy hands into her unnaturally warm ones—a lingering reminder of her constant fever. "Listen to me. We take this one miserable step at a time. First rule: you cannot go home looking like a ghost. Aunt Diana is too sharp. The second she looks at you, she'll know something is wrong, and stress is the last thing her heart needs."

I opened my mouth to protest, but she cut me off before I could speak.

"You're staying at my place tonight," she commanded softly. "I already called my mom. Valerie's heading over to Diana's tomorrow morning with a tin of her famous cinnamon rolls. She'll tell your mom she just dropped by to gossip and help with the groceries. Total cover operation."

A lump formed in my throat. Valerie Thorne was the kind of neighbor every struggling family prayed for—unconditionally kind, relentlessly practical. "Zoe, you didn't have to—"

"Shut up. Yes, I did. Now follow me across the bridge before the traffic gets completely unhinged."

An hour later, we were holed up in Zoe's tiny, chaotic apartment in Crown Heights. The space was an explosion of thrifted velvet, half-finished canvases, and stacked art books, but it smelled of cinnamon and sage. It felt safe.

She shoved a steaming mug of hot cocoa into my hands, flipped open her battered MacBook, and dropped onto the corduroy sofa beside me. "Right. The mourning period is officially over. Time to strike back. Let's find out which corporate scumbags deserve to be saved by Maya Prescott."

I couldn't help the small snort of laughter that slipped out. "You make me sound like a mercenary."

"You are one. Just with better hair and an accounting degree."

We dove into the job boards, our shoulders pressed together. But after forty-five minutes of clicking through senior strategist and project lead listings, Zoe began rubbing her temples, fighting the bone-deep weariness that always shadowed her illness. Mid-level management salaries, even in prime Manhattan firms, hovered around numbers that made my stomach churn. After taxes, not a single one came close to covering my mother's specialized treatments, private in-home care, and experimental therapies—a crushing baseline that devoured nearly ten grand every single month. My chest squeezed tight. The math simply did not work.

Noticing the dead silence settling over me, and stifling a tired yawn of her own, Zoe reached over, swiped two fingers across the trackpad, and brought up an entertainment gossip portal.

"Okay, tactical timeout," she announced. "Your brain is smoking. Look at some pretty, useless people to cleanse the palate."

Splashed across the header in bold, screaming tabloid font was a massive headline:

HOCKEY'S GOLDEN BOY NO-SHOWS AGAIN: MILES VANCE SPIRALS IN WAKE OF LATEST NIGHTCLUB BRAWL.

The lead photo took up half the screen. A tall, broad-shouldered man with a messy mop of golden-blond hair was stumbling past a wall of bouncers outside an exclusive meatpacking district club. He wore dark designer sunglasses at two in the morning, an unbuttoned silk shirt revealing the rigid contours of his chest, and a sneer aimed directly at the flashing lenses. Even through the grainy pap shot, there was an unmistakable, dangerous arrogance rolling off him—a man utterly untouchable, drowning in his own excess.

I scowled at the screen. "Him again? God, people like that make me sick. He's handed the world on a silver platter, earns millions for pushing a piece of rubber across ice, and spends his free time driving sports cars into hedges."

Zoe propped her chin on her palm, sighing dramatically as she stared at the image. "Yeah, he's a walking red flag. But you have to admit, Maya... he's gorgeous. And look at his jaw. Doesn't he look just a little bit... tragically tortured?"

"He looks wasted, Zoe," I deadpanned, staring coldly at the screen.

The contrast made my stomach turn. A single bottle of the vintage champagne he likely poured down the drain at that club could cover an entire week of Mom's blood filtration sessions. We lived on the same island, breathed the same air, yet existed in completely separate universes. He lived in the clouds, utterly immune to consequence, while I was suffocating on the pavement.

I reached out and decisively clicked the tab closed, returning us to the stark white grid of job listings. "Back to reality. Let's keep looking."

Zoe poked her tongue out at me, but she didn't argue. She squeezed my shoulder and started reading the next listing out loud.

By two in the morning, the apartment had gone silent. I lay awake in Zoe's cramped guest room, staring at the peeling plaster on the ceiling, listening to the radiator clank in the corner. Sleep was miles away.

My fingers curled around my phone. I pulled up my messages and typed a quick note to my mother:

Hey Mom, work ran late and we're doing a team sprint early tomorrow. Crashing at Zoe's tonight so I don't wake you. Love you, see you tomorrow afternoon.

The three dots appeared almost instantly.

Diana: Okay, sweetie. Don't work too hard. Make sure you eat a real breakfast. Love you more.

A stinging heat rose behind my eyes. I gripped the phone until my knuckles turned white. A lie. Built on another lie. She was sleeping peacefully in our tiny apartment, believing her brilliant, capable daughter was conquering the corporate ladder, completely unaware that our financial lifeline was dangling by a fraying thread.

I closed my eyes, forcing slow, deliberate breaths. But when the darkness took over, the images wouldn't stop. Endlessly scrolling job boards with dead-end paychecks, colliding violently with the mocking, golden sneer of a hockey star who didn't care whether he lived or died.

One was hell. The other was an untouchable heaven. And I was trapped squarely in the abyss between them.

I rolled over, staring hard into the shadows. I had six months of runway, a dying mother, and zero room for error.

Tomorrow, come hell or high water, I was going to find a way out.