Crazy Thing Called Love by Molly O'Keefe

Author:Molly O'Keefe [O'Keefe, Molly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Romance, contemporary, Western
ISBN: 9780345533692
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2013-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The green room echoed with silence. It pounded with it. Or maybe it was Maddy’s head, she couldn’t tell.

I think I’m having a stroke, she thought.

For about a year after her divorce Maddy had lived in a state of deep freeze. Which was ironic since she’d moved to Miami with her mom.

But after the emotional smackdown of her marriage, the endless confrontations and arguments, the sustained emotional violence of being in love with Billy Wilkins, she’d been wrung out and empty. So for one blissful year she had let herself feel nothing—she’d been totally removed from the sludge of bad news and anxiety and depression.

She didn’t care about Billy. The stories in the gossip magazines. She didn’t care about whomever he was fucking. The divorce. It was all just background noise, echoes heard from far away.

Every night she laid her head down on her pillow and she slept like a baby. And every morning she woke up and, using the money from the divorce settlement, she went to school at the University of Miami and studied broadcast journalism.

There were no friends. No boyfriends. No rebound sex. Nothing. No one got close enough to touch her, close enough to hurt her. No one got close enough that she had to care about them.

All she had to care about was herself. She lost a shit-load of weight, and maybe it was the vaguely distant and emotionless way she related the news, but she was good at it.

And her star began to rise.

Slowly, she’d started to feel things again over the years. Pride. Elation. Disappointment. Now betrayal, thanks to Ruth.

But she had lived in that deep freeze for so long that it had become her natural habitat and sometimes she had to force herself to feel something. To engage on a human level. To not treat the whole world and every person she met like it was a segment she had to get through.

But not right now.

The ice she’d lived in for so long had cracked and split and she felt it all. Every molecule of guilt, every inch of shame and anger and horror at what had happened on her show. On her watch.

Those children, they weren’t Billy’s. She didn’t believe that lie for a moment. They were Denise’s kids, or Janice’s, there was no other explanation.

And her producers were responsible for that ambush.

Ruth’s mic buzzed and she pressed the button on her headpiece. “He’s gone,” she said. “And not coming back. Put on that Jason Aldean special. No, Phil,” Ruth glanced at Maddy, “she’s not going on either. You screwed us all.”

Ruth let go of the headset and stumbled back, one of the overstuffed chairs in the corner catching her as she fell.

“There go our careers,” Ruth said.

“How much did you know?” Madelyn asked, unconcerned about her career. About the Jason Aldean rerun. All of it was a distant second to finding out how big a setup this had been.

Ruth didn’t look at her, just stared up at the ceiling as if she were considering melting into her chair.

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