Sweet Romance10 min read
The Million, the Mistress Job, and the Porridge
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I left Conrad Martin for a million. Six years later, he hired me to be his paid lover—ten thousand a lick, as he joked at first—and I took the money without a second thought.
"You always did love money," he said, like a verdict.
"I love my father more," I answered.
"Same thing," he said, and tossed a business card at me like a bone.
I remember the way the elevator smelled that day: cheap perfume and cold metal. I remember stepping out and Conrad standing there, as handsome and hard as he’d always been. I remember how everyone at the university had known the story—that Hailey Ellis from the English class took a million and left her first love, and how she drove off in a new car the same afternoon. I remember their whispering faces.
"Hailey," Conrad said when we passed each other. "Your taste in men falls faster than stocks."
I lifted my chin. "You wouldn't understand. Old men are sentimental. I like the practical kind."
"Earl, don't get any ideas," Conrad added when the manager, Earl Lombardi, reached for my waist like he owned the place.
Earl laughed and squeezed a little. "Of course. I always take care of my people."
Conrad's smile hardened. "Hailey, I underestimated your shamelessness."
"Compliments are rare. Thank you," I tossed back.
Earl's hand slipped; I stepped away. I had no patience for a leering manager. He would be the kind to promise the moon and charge you rent for the ladder.
Later that night Earl cornered me in the hotel hallway, his breath smelling of whiskey. "Hailey," he murmured. "The suite is booked. If you behave, the company will look the other way."
"Mr. Lombardi," I said, cold and polite, "my price rises by the second."
He left in a snarl.
Two days later he put ten reasons on a company form and docked my pay until my balance looked like nothing at all. I left before the ink dried.
"How am I supposed to help Easton?" I told my mother on the phone. "He has the mortgage sign-off tomorrow."
"Get it," she said like the world was made for ordering. "You owe the family. Your father is dead because of you."
The familiar little voice of guilt stabbed through me. I felt the million like a stone I had carried in my chest for years. I had traded a clean, loving past for the money that could buy surgery, then debt, then silence—everything but the forgiveness I wanted.
I took the first job I could find. Then Conrad called.
"You're looking for work?" he said. "I have something. High pay. It's simple. Make my fiancée jealous."
"I won't be humiliated for cheap," I said.
"Ten thousand a month. Base. Rewards if you 'perform well.'"
I laughed. "I'm not proud. I'm efficient."
He snorted. "You never were."
I went to Conrad's office because the pay was real and because the man who had once held me like a shelter had a way of being mean and soft in the same sentence. Conrad explained the job from his leather chair: he would make scenes about me, let me do little things—laugh in the wrong places, press a hand where a hand shouldn't go—and Regina Khan would see and think twice. "Make her jealous," he said. "Play the part. For a fee."
"What's my limit?" I asked.
"No limit," he said with a cold smile. "Do whatever you need to."
I learned his quirks again: how he hated loud laughter, how he was allergic to pity, how he could be cruel with the smallest sound. I learned to bring him tea with both hands. I learned where he liked the blanket, how he wrote under pressure. I learned to place my fingers on the back of his chair like I had once.
"Don't touch me without permission," he snapped one evening as I reached to straighten a cushion.
"Permission granted," I replied, and when he laughed at my audacity it sounded almost like the old Conrad. He was dangerous like that: cruel, then soft; distant, then suddenly there with a courtesy that made my chest constrict.
I had rules. One: I would never let a man who could buy me forget the price of my dignity. Two: I would give nothing that couldn't be counted. Three: I would never cry in front of men who could walk away.
Then Giuseppe Contreras showed his true colors.
Giuseppe was a client of the espresso kind—smooth until he was not. He told stories about how men got everything and deserved more. He followed me once, later burst into my apartment like he owned the keys. He grabbed my throat and said, "You're mine for the night. Don't make me wait."
"No," I hissed, and I remember a rush of something like heat and horrible distance. He knocked me to the floor. He was heavy and angry and certain that men could take what they wanted. I fought and I hit and I kicked. He cursed and hit me back.
I survived. He survived. The apartment was a war zone of overturned lamps, and later the police came, and later I woke in the hospital with bandages and a white, sterile smell.
"She was the mistress," the rumor said, fast and cruel. "She keeps company with men who aren't hers."
Daniela Smirnov—Giuseppe's wife—came to the hospital and her eyes were steel. She had hired a private detective on suspicion and found a trove of nonsense photos: a hand on an arm, a laugh, a staged embrace. The photos were a spark.
Daniela walked into the office the next day like a queen with a banner. "Giuseppe cheated with an employee," she said. "He humiliated her, he hit her, he lied to us."
There is a kind of public fury that tastes like vindication. Daniela dragged Giuseppe through the corridor and turned the scene into a performance. She unfurled a banner: "Giuseppe Contreras—liar, abuser, unfit." Phones came out. Colleagues stopped. Security listened. A crowd formed. Giuseppe's face went through a slow color change—first confusion, then smugness, then a hot flush of denial.
"How dare you!" he yelled, his voice splitting. "This is a lie—she provoked me!"
Daniela's eyes did not leave him. "You attacked her in her home. The evidence is here. The witness statements are here. The hotel tapes. The messages."
He tried to laugh. "You can't make me—"
People started to murmur. A junior assistant pulled out her phone. Another man said quietly, "We saw the CCTV of him leaving her block. He forced the door." A woman clapped slowly, like a metronome. Someone recorded.
"You're fired," the company director intoned, because public outrage makes even the company formal. "You are suspended pending legal action."
Giuseppe's face collapsed into something smaller than the gallery of smirks he'd worn. "You can't—" He tried to reach for Daniela. Security pushed him back. A secretary stepped forward and handed him a paper—legal notice. His mouth flapped, the way a fish's does when it has been pulled from water.
By then the crowd had formed a circle. "Shame!" someone shouted. Phones recorded the scene in real time. Someone filmed Daniela's face as she walked past, unbowed. "You beat a woman. You thought you could hide behind money." The voices swelled into a chorus. People spat—figuratively, and literally. A delivery guy cursed him. "Hope you choke on your lunch," he said.
Giuseppe's hands, once confident, were now trembling. His worst expression was not when he was hit; it was when no one else was afraid of him anymore. The spectators filmed him pleading.
"Please—" he began, and the public became the judge—indifferent, merciless.
Daniela stepped forward. "You lied to us. You played a role with her and then you used that to hurt her. You will pay what's due." She pressed an envelope into the clerk's hand: a copy of the police report, the photos, the testimony.
He staggered, like a man waking from anesthesia. He tried to deny. "I never—"
"Stop," someone said. "Just stop." People took pictures of his face as it crumpled.
Then the most brutal thing happened: his friends deserted him. He called out for help and his calls echoed like hollow nails. A woman accused him of earlier slights. "You don't even deserve a job," a colleague said. "You don't deserve our respect."
Security led him away. He screamed there would be revenge, but the cameras held him frozen. People like the taste of seeing arrogance fall.
Daniela didn't dance on his ruin. She walked straight to the waiting press and said, "If men think they can take what they want from women, they'll be found out. He will answer to the law."
There was applause. There were some rotten voices who argued that a marriage is only two people, but the majority stood with the woman who had been hit. People uploaded the video. The headline wrote itself.
When justice takes a public stage, it can be a sermon and a spectacle. Giuseppe went from being untouchable to being a cautionary tale in the space of an hour. That change was not clean. He protested, he tried to bargain; he became smaller and smaller until he had nothing to bargain with.
The punishment was not just legal. It was social. His company badge was cut off. He walked down the corridor with his head low. People stopped making eye contact. A man who had once sat at large tables now ate alone in a corner and watched his reputation unravel like a cheap sweater.
I watched it all from my hospital bed—wounded, furious, and somehow vindicated. Daniela gave me a look that said, I believe you. She handed me cash for the bills and pushed Giuseppe's phone at me so I could have evidence if I needed it. Later she sent me five thousand as a gesture. "Take care," she said. "Go somewhere safe."
Conrad texted while I was leaving the hospital. "You should sue him. You don't deserve that," it read.
I looked at his name and remembered the million. I remembered my father's last message: "Hailey, always be honest with yourself." He had left me a lesson in courage and a debt I still tried to pay.
I did sue. Giuseppe lost his job. The papers ran the story for days. People who had once sneered at me now came forward and apologized for opening the door to gossip.
"You're a different woman," a neighbor said when I walked down the street. "You look serious. You look like someone who knows the price of things and the worth."
I laughed hollowly. "I've always known both."
If you think everything became okay after Giuseppe's punishment, it's not that simple. My mother, Rosa Dunn, did something crueler: she tried to hand me off. She had taken advantage of my suffering to arrange a marriage with a man who had the name but not the mind—Gaspard Vinogradov, a man perfectly willing to parrot his family's dowry terms. My mother thought I needed to be safe, not free.
"Marry him," she said, "and the family's debts will be settled. You'll be fixed."
I looked at the woman who had once tucked me in and now tugged my hair to make me obey. For the first time I felt something like absolute detachment.
"No," I said. "I paid you back. I paid Easton's loan. I gave money to the mortgage. I'm done owing you anything."
She slapped me and said I was a disgrace. Easton cried into the phone. I left home with bruises and a suitcase of anger.
I took a bus to a place I had always loved: a remote county where I had once taught for a summer. There were children who had eyes like question marks and hands that asked for the world. I signed up as a volunteer teacher. I cut my hair short. I learned to boil porridge properly so the children could have warm breakfasts. For the first time in years, my days were full of work that had no price tag attached.
Months later I heard about Conrad again in a way that made my heart trip. He had taken the most expensive path to find me: billboards, ads, even international posters. He hired teams to publish "Hailey, where are you?" on screens across cities. He spent obscene money on notices and on a single line that he posted every morning for five hundred and sixty days: "Hailey, where are you?"
"He looks foolish," a neighbor told me. "He looks hungry."
"Good," I said. "Let him be hungry."
A year and a half after I left, Conrad found me. Regina Khan was gone from his side; she had never had the heart for his worries. Conrad stood on the dusty playground where my students were rehearsing a play. He was thinner. He had a look of sleep-deprived determination that had been softening him for months.
"Hailey," he breathed when he saw me. "Where have you been?"
I put down an apple I had been slicing. "Teaching," I said.
His eyes filled, and for a moment I thought he might kneel. Instead he looked at the children, then at me, then at the little bowl of porridge that sat in his hands—he remembered me talking once about how I wanted to make porridge that felt like coming home.
"Do you—" he started, then stopped. He did not beg clumsily like a man with money. He opened a tiny, stubborn smile. "I missed you. I wasted years being an idiot."
"Conrad," I said, "you wasted years making a spectacle of me online."
"But I was trying," he said. "I didn't know how else to reach you."
"There's an easier way next time," I said. "Don't buy ads. Learn to ask."
He knelt, clumsy and sincere in the same breath. "Will you come back? Will you—"
I looked at the children who clustered around the porridge pot with faces like small moons. I remembered my father and the million that had bought medical hope and wrecked my home. I remembered Giuseppe's face as the crowd turned away.
"No," I said quietly, and I felt like I stepped out of a dream.
He looked shocked, then small, then strangely proud. "You can at least let me make porridge for them," he said finally.
I narrowed my eyes. "You mean cook?" I asked.
"Yes." He grinned. "I'll boil it badly if I have to. Just give me the chance."
He spent months learning the stove. He spent the money to help the community center. He prostrated himself in small, unshowy ways. His ads stopped. He sent one final tweet: "Hailey, I want your porridge." And then, after a pause, "Arrange."
We had three small, sweet moments that I still carry like coins:
- When he laughed—once, quietly—because he had burned the porridge and still tried to feed a shy kid with a spoon. He had corrected a laugh into a smile for no one but me. "I can't cook for my life," he said. Then he smiled and fed the child a warm spoonful.
- When he reached out and took my hand to help me collect stray chairs after a rehearsal. His fingers brushed mine and he said, "That's my place," like he meant it without ego.
- When he waited for me at the bus stop for a whole hour with a thermos of hot porridge, and when I took it he bowed awkwardly and said, "For the woman who taught me why a bowl matters."
If anyone had told me years ago that I'd fall for such small things, I would've laughed and called them naive. But fate loves small things.
Conrad's public penance was not a spectacle of humiliation. He burned his bridges in a different way: he spent, he apologized, and he found humility. He did not become the man who bought me back with a thousand flashy ads. He learned to be present. He climbed down from his tower by degrees, and each small act made him less showy and more human.
I still wake with the memory of the million like a scar and the memory of being both sold and self-sold. But in the afternoons, when I stir the porridge and watch a child smile, I feel a warmth that has nothing to do with money.
"Are you staying?" Conrad asked, once, when the rain drummed on the tin roof and the children were asleep.
"I'm staying," I said.
He smiled—not a public smile, not a rich man's grin, but a small, true thing. He spilled some porridge on his shirt and laughed. I wiped it with my thumb. We both looked like people who had survived storms and found shelter in a small, humble house.
It was not a tidy ending. My mother still existed, and she still might ring like a bell with old debts. Giuseppe still faced courts and loses, and that felt like something worth watching. But the porridge was warm. That was enough to be unique, and enough to be mine.
The End
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