Sweet Romance12 min read
I Managed His Hearts and Tried to Buy My Own
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1
"Miss Lin, there's one million in the card. Mr. Shaw said we should part peacefully—"
I slide the bank card back across the lacquered desk. Melissa Silva's eyes are wet; mascara tracks make her face softer, like rain on glass.
"One million?" she whispers. "He can't—he wouldn't—"
I have no patience for poetry. "One million!" I snap, louder than necessary. "Do you know what that is? Normal people don't get that in a lifetime. You cry about it? For real?"
Melissa gasps. "But I—"
"You cried to the wrong person, sweetheart." I fold my hands on the desk and give the practiced sympathetic smile of a woman who has spent three years being the tidy center of a messy orbit. "If you want the money, I can help. If you want the man—" I make my voice soft and honest, "I need to warn you: Finn Shaw is not someone you can take home like a souvenir."
"How dare you!" she screams, and then—like a scene we both know too well—she lifts the iced Americano and smashes it in my face.
"Kay," Nolan had once called me behind my back, "you're the palace steward. You manage the household's mess." He'd laughed. He didn't know the smell of coffee in my hair.
Melissa storms out. The bank card goes with her. She forgets the PIN.
I sit back. The cold coffee numbs my cheeks. I open my wallet, scan my WeChat for the quick-pay code, and type, "Dry cleaning: 800. Emotional damage: 1000." I leave a small space for bargaining.
She comes back two minutes later, mascara newly polished, voice small: "What's the PIN?"
"Two digits, then a few numbers," I say. "You can try crying again if you like."
She pays, I swipe the money, and I go back to the twenty-eighth floor office that smells faintly of leather and control. Finn passes me in the corridor; he looks at me like something that shouldn't be under his shoes.
"Miss Silva threw coffee on you?" he asks without inflection.
"Her grammar was off," I say cheerfully. "Can I expense it?"
He doesn't even flick an eyebrow. He sails into his office like a yacht returning to harbor. Five minutes later, my phone pings: a tiny green envelope. Two hundred. Finn's transfer. My grin dies. Two hundred. The man who moves millions like a deck of cards just sent two hundred. I send him a thumbs-up emoji. He will never be generous where it would actually mean something to me.
2
My name is Kaydence Coleman. I am Finn Shaw's secretary, and, unofficially, I am the house manager of his romantic detritus. "Keeper of the harem" is what the rumor mill calls me. I do pickups, depositions, payments, and disappearances. If Finn wants a woman, I find her. If he tires of one, I make sure she will not be a problem again.
People think I am greedy. Maybe they're not entirely wrong. I want money. I want enough money to buy a small house at the foot of the mountain where my grandmother used to live. I want to sleep without calculating whether the rent comes out right. I hide these wants under meticulous spreadsheets and polite smiles.
But the truth, a stupid, little human truth, is that I have wanted Finn Shaw since my first day in his orbit. Not because his face is a painting—though he is one—but because being near him feels like being at the center of a storm and the storm pays.
"Do you know what he likes?" Melissa had demanded after she'd thrown the coffee. "Tall? Quiet? Loud?"
I shake my head. "No pattern," I say. "He loves a hundred different faces the way some men love a hundred different wines. But one woman holds his quiet. Her name is Amira Lopez. She's the one he never stopped tracing with his eyes. That's why he can't be caught."
Melissa leaves anyway richer and sadder. I keep the account of what is mine.
3
At one a.m., Nolan calls.
"Kay, he's drunk. Come over."
Finn never drinks. In three years I've never signed a coffee cup under his name that had anything more than a ribbon of steam. So I go.
His chauffeur is arguing with someone outside a black car. Finn is slumped in the backseat like a big dog who has been left in the rain. He smells of alcohol and regret. Nolan is there, all charm in a suit that still looks new.
"Sorry," Nolan says when he spots me. "I know it's not your job. But he won't let anyone else touch him."
"You're his friend," I say. "Then you owe him the dignity of decent caretaking."
Finn half-opens one eye. "You're here."
He is affectionate-bruised, and it makes my chest prickle in a way that feels like currency. "I am," I whisper. "I'll get you inside."
We get him home. He peels off his watch. He gives me a drunken smile I have never seen in daylight—soft, almost like gratitude.
Then he kisses me. A clumsy, wet thing at first that becomes patient. I think, briefly, "This is easier than I thought." Then he mumbles against my lips, "Guan—Guan—" and I feel the world tip.
"Guan?" I ask when I start to notice the missing sense of triumph.
He turns his face to me and, in the slurred way of people hiding a knife, says, "Guan. Guan is missing." He means Amira Lopez. He's calling for her.
My hands go from holding to pushing. I am furious-trapped and embarrassed, and yet I can't help the way the warm of his mouth has left a small stain on my skin. The one who should be outraged is me. The one who is humiliated is the me who wanted the money more than the man.
"Get out," I think, but that feels weak. Instead I leave him, and I vow to get what is owed.
4
Back home I count the ways Finn has given his women a million and given me crumbs. He makes women into soft investments. He pays one million for a clean break. He waves away affection as if it were a ridiculous, wasteful hobby. People call him a philanthropist in women, and a miser to those who need him to be generous.
But opportunity drips when you are hungry. Finn's history is public—everyone knows him, everyone knows Amira Lopez. Amira and Finn were youth-bright, married by rumor, part of one another's story until something pulled them apart. Amira left. Finn changed. He collected women like postcards.
The crucial fact I discover—giddily—is that all of Finn's women share pieces of Amira. Not whole, just snatches. Nose here, eye shape there. Like someone had taken a photograph, cut it up, and pasted other women's faces together to make a dozen versions of something lost.
So here's my plan: I will be the honest, true "girlfriend." I will convince Amira that Finn is actually in love again, but with me now, and that will prick her pride. She will come back. For this, I will be paid, and then I can leave.
Ten million is what I ask. Finn laughs. "Thirty thousand a month," he counters. "We'll try month by month."
"I won't work for peanuts," I say. "One million is what you're used to due to your past splurges."
He stares and then signs a contract. He will pay a salary. I resign. The office gossips. "She left like a noble martyr," one says. "She ran after love." No one knows the script I wrote; only Finn and I know it's theatrical.
5
The act begins poorly. He resents me for starting it. He treats me like a footman on weekends. I become his living advertisement. I subsist on his dismissive looks but display devotion in public. I cry when he wants me to, laugh when it's better for the camera. We stage late-night waits, leaning against a Rolls; we stage a crying, dramatic confrontation outside my block so the tabloids can feast.
"He even slept at your apartment?" someone asks.
"He did," I say. "He was kind." My real kindness is a ledger.
The plan works in strange ways. The city believes us. Amira returns from abroad. She is as untouchable as rumor says: elegant, sure, and quietly furious.
"She makes you small," Finn says to me once. "I don't know why I keep trying."
"Because you never stopped," I say. "Or because you can't forget."
He is complicated like that.
6
At Amira's first show back, we go. The gallery is white and strict; Amira is more so. She moves like water. I am supposed to be the loyal girlfriend, peering and reminding Finn of what he will lose. I smile, I breathe, I sell the scene. Finn is strange that night—tender, careful, like someone handling a fragile substance.
Then a surprising thing happens: during lunch, I meet Amira's fiancé, Youssef Bergmann. He is a director—supposedly a serious, quiet man with an odd, hungry charm. At the buffet he jokes with me about imperial crab legs. He is warm in a way Finn never is. I think, briefly, "Of course she left for this."
Later, a gossip piece lands in my lap: Youssef has been photographed with a student in intimate poses. The proofs are ugly. The idea of deleting them is tempting. If I drop them now, Finn might get Amira back quickly—and then my job is done. But if I reveal them later, I can cause a public fall that will satisfy a different appetite.
I wait.
7
Later still, the story breaks. Amira finds out. I could have been the hero who told her, and yet I hesitated. My hesitation starts a chain.
Amira is stoic. She refuses to believe the tabloid at first. "Show me," she asks in private.
"Do you want proof?" I ask. "Because I have it."
She nods.
We do a horrible, brilliant thing. I arrange an unveiling at her gallery opening. The room is full: collectors, old friends, critics. Finn stands near the bar, nervous in silence. Youssef moves like a man about to deliver a speech.
"Tonight," I say into the microphone after the show, "we are here to celebrate art and truth." My voice doesn't tremble. "But truth, like a painting, sometimes has a layer hidden under varnish."
I ask someone to turn the projector on. The photograph slides up: Youssef with the student on the beach, arms wrapped, kissing. The room goes still. Phones go up as if to say, "Record this."
The punishment scene begins.
"That's Youssef Bergmann," I say calmly. "And that's not an anonymous lover. That's a student from his own academy. This is not private passion. This is abuse of trust."
Youssef's face drains from bronze to ash. He grins a small, brittle smile and starts to speak. "This is—this is a misunderstanding—"
He tries to blame a poor camera angle. "You don't know the context," he insists.
A critic in the front row clicks his tongue. "Context doesn't explain a man in a position of mentorship entwined with a student," he says loudly.
People start whispering. A woman near the back laughs, short and sharp.
"Do you see what you look like?" someone else calls out. "Do you see yourself?"
Youssef's mask breaks. He paces. At first his mouth forms denials. "I would never—" The sound is small. A reporter stands up and asks for a comment: "Is this true? Are you sleeping with a student?"
He gropes for words, then lashes out, desperate to salvage dignity: "We were involved. It was consensual. It was private."
The word private lands in a world already recording. Cameras close in. People start to record with their phones. The gallery owner pushes through the crowd to block the projector.
"Stop the slideshow!" Amira says, calm and cold. She is a column of marble in a silk dress. "You have ruined your own story."
Youssef's eyes go to Amira, pleading. "Amira—"
She lifts a hand. "Not here," she says, and the room, which had been leaning forward to see the spectacle, leans back in disgust.
A young woman near the front—the student left anonymous until now—stands. Her face is flushed and furious. She yells something that is sharp and final: "You used me to feel important. You lied about responsibility. You used your position."
There are gasps. Someone starts to whisper "criminal" and "expel" and "resign." Someone else calls security. A man in a designer suit snaps photographs so hard his camera shakes. Others simply turn their phones to video, murmuring commentary.
Youssef's defenses crack. He moves from brandishing denials to a brittle, pleading tone. "Please," he begs, voice small. "Please."
"Please what?" the student demands. "Please protect your career? Please let me be the one who pays for your mistakes?"
Amira looks at him as if he were an insect. "You told me to trust you," she says. "You told me trust would be rewarded. But you were lying to both of us."
"That is not how it was," Youssef says. He tries to summon charm, then realizes charm cannot stop the dam. The gallery murmurs hard enough to make a low, earthquake sound.
Phones flash. Someone claps—slow, savage. "Shame," a voice says, and then more join: "Shame."
He collapses into legalese and guilt. "My apologies," he says finally, trying on words. "I apologize to those I've hurt."
It is not enough. A security guard, commissioned by the gallery to maintain reputations, steps in. People want to watch him leave. They film his shrinking figure, the way his shoulders fold under the weight of being seen.
For the first time that night, Youssef loses control. Denial gives way to a sort of animal fear. He paces like a caged thing. He begs Amira to listen. People shout back. "You used your power!" the student cries. "You betrayed us all!"
I call out, "Finn, he's not just a liar. He's a man who thinks power buys forgiveness."
Finn's hand tightens on the stem of his glass. He is watching, eyes unreadable. Amira's face has not changed—like a painting's glaze: distant, ruinous, final.
Youssef's supporters shrink away. Some mutter about careers and reputations. Others open their social apps, already writing headlines. A man in front stands and asks in a level tone, "So what's next? Do we still allow someone like this to teach?"
"Expel him," the student answers. "Stop him from standing at a podium and tempting youth."
Youssef folds. He has no shield left. His belligerence slides to a plea. "Give me a chance to explain," he begs.
An elderly patron, who has not been taking sides, looks him in the eye. "Chance after harm is called scandal," she says. "You used your chance. It is gone."
He becomes small, diminished under the eyes of those who have watched him profess integrity. The cameras keep rolling into a public record that will not forget this minute. His face shifts from calculated smirk to naked humiliation. Denial, then anger, then collapse into tears—that arc plays out under the gallery lights.
Around us, the crowd reacts. Some whisper, "What a hypocrite." Many are furious. A few, cruelly, start singing the very songs Amira once would have loved, twisting the knife. People take photographs, they call their friends, they upload the clips. A trending topic blooms in ten minutes.
Amira watches all of it and then turns to me. She does not look angry at me. She looks like someone who has been given back a truth. "Thank you," she says quietly. Her voice is small, but everyone hears it.
Youssef tries one last time to speak to her, to say he never meant harm. "You meant to," she replies, cool as winter. "And that makes it worse."
He crumples. The applause is not for him. It's for the end of his illusion of honor. He leaves with camera flashes catching his humiliating retreat. The punishment is not legal; it's public and social. The crowd judges. He loses the halo of influence he once wore. He will be stripped of invites, of esteem; sponsors will pull back their calls. The humiliation is slow and clinical. It is spectacle and consequence braided tight.
Later, lawyers and apologies will be arranged. But in that white room, among the hovering art and the hum of phones, I see the neat arithmetic of consequence: betrayal becomes public, and in public it eats the one who has feasted on secret advantage.
8
The aftermath is more theater than finality. Finn watches Amira stand steady, unbroken. He drinks quietly. Later, he drives me home.
"You did it because you wanted me to have Amira back," he says before I can open my mouth.
"No," I say. "I did it because I finally learned how to balance my ledger."
He looks at me, baffled. "You are not a ledger, Kay." There is softness in his voice that does not come with money.
"You keep saying that," I say. "But the money is real."
He smiles, a small, crooked thing. "Money doesn't buy the things I want. But you... you know how to get them."
9
Weeks pass. Our performance continues; sometimes it feels like sitting in the middle of a very long play. The city has an appetite for scandal and romance and both are fattened to suit it.
Amira gets closer to finding her own place. Finn and I sleep in a rhythm that is sometimes tender and sometimes merely transactional. He transfers an amount that would have been a crime to turn down. He gives me gifts at moments that unspool different feelings. He stages small kindnesses—an iced water left where I will see it, a jacket wrapped around my shoulders when the night throws cold at us.
He once asked, puzzlingly, "What did you want when you were a child?"
"A Ferris wheel light," I said. It was an old, shameful longing. When I was twelve, someone promised to light a Ferris wheel for me on my birthday and didn't come.
He remembered.
10
On my birthday he surprises me with a private Ferris wheel moment—an entire small amusement park styled into one glowing dome. "You lit the Ferris wheel," I say, stunned.
He nods. "Small lights," he says. "But they are yours."
For a delicious, soft hour, the city falls away. I watch little bulbs twinkle in pattern, and for the first time in a long line of bargains, I feel something that is not ledgered. I feel small and unpurchased.
The phone buzzes—Amira calling. He steps away to answer. I watch the Ferris wheel spin alone. I am high and dizzy and cold and alive.
When I come down, he is waiting at my doorstep with a familiar, detached face. He folds an envelope into my hand. Inside is a transfer—this time, much larger than two hundred. "For the work," he says. "For the Ferris wheel."
I count the zeros and laugh like a lunatic. Money tastes like the remedy I spent years trying to get. It is obscene, and it comforts me.
11
Then the scandal about me surfaces. Someone digs my old records, finds an old name, an old humiliation from school—claims I changed my face, that I plotted from the beginning. The rumor is poisonous. Amira's team or friends plant seeds of doubt about my sincerity. The city is ravenous for betrayal.
"She's an impostor," someone says online. "A vengeance machine who cost us our innocent Finn's dignity."
But the worst part is that I, who have spent years manipulating how I am seen, feel suddenly very small. The things I manufactured now bind me.
Amira calls me out in front of a crowd at a charity lunch. "Were you always this scripted?" she asks. "Was I ever the point?"
I look at her and say, "You were the point for him. For me, you were a shape I waited too long to become."
12
The story collapses into a truth I cannot deny: I wanted money, yes. I wanted closeness, yes. I wanted to be recognized by the boy who had been a story in my childhood. Sometimes those wants were mutual in unlikely ways.
Finn and I negotiate what is left. We are a messy arrangement. Sometimes tenderness blooms. Sometimes it is only a ledger. But when the city quiets and the Ferris wheel's last light flickers off, I tuck the memory into a small, private pocket that no one can audit.
The last time I think about Amira, she is in a photograph of her own—untouched and walking away, like a name you remember in a song. Finn is at my side. He is less sure than he once was; I am slightly richer than I was; the cat—Chance Greene—demands his evening kibble.
I fold the contract and put it in a drawer. Somewhere a lawyer will keep a copy. But outside, in the small theater of our life, there are only the little lights and the memory of a man who once called for a name that wasn’t mine and the woman who ended his illusions.
On a night when the Ferris wheel lights twinkle somewhere in the city, I close my eyes. Money can buy me a house, but not the shape of a heart. Still, I earned my light. I bought it on terms I can live with.
The End
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