The Billionaire Dating Game: A Romance Novel (30 page)

“There are a few girls that I really like. Kate is super cute and nice,” Dylan said. “Even though I didn’t like what she cooked.”

“Anyone else?”

“Yeah. Lisa.”

The shot cut to Piers’ face. There was no overt reaction, but I noticed a flash across his eyes, a slight narrowing of something. Jealousy? Then the camera went back to Dylan.

“You know, I mean—she was really down to earth. And I think we clicked, you know, like on a deeper level. I love chicken nuggets.”

I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it.

“Hush!” Kate said. “Listen.”

“You know,” Dylan continued. “I think she really might be my soulmate.”

“Lisa?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Lisa.”

The video cut to a commercial. Kate turned off her phone screen.

“See?” she said.

“See what?”

“You can’t leave.”

“Why? Because Dylan decided that his soulmate is someone else who likes chicken nuggets?”

Kate’s eyes moistened under a frown.

“Lisa, I’m serious. All of the episodes are like this. He says great stuff about you all the time.”

“And he never mentions you? I find that hard to believe.”

“Well, I mean, sometimes. But it seems like he likes you more.”

“Kate. You can’t—listen, you can’t believe what’s on TV. The way they edit these things, they could make them say anything they want. It’s all fake.”

“But—”

“Look, you should be happy about this!” I said. “You think Dylan is going to choose Mia over you?”

“Of course not,” Kate said, her voice impatient. “But it can’t be me!”

“Why not?”

“Dylan is in love with you. You saw the video. He thinks you’re his soulmate.”

“No,” I corrected. “He
thought
I was his soulmate. He’s obviously wrong. Anyway, you two get along much better.”

“He wants you on the show even after you kissed Piers,” Kate said softly. “Why would he do that, unless—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, cutting her off. I didn’t want to have that conversation right now. “I’m leaving.”

“Stay through the finals. Stay until he picks you, at least. Then you can walk away with a hundred thousand dollars.”

“So that you can get him after I leave?”

Kate’s face was pink.

“I—I mean—”

I burst out laughing.

“Kate, you can’t hide it. You are head over heels for Dylan.”

“But he doesn’t—”

“He likes you. Trust me.”

“Then why did he kiss you?”

Kate’s eyes glistened with tears. She looked miserable.

“Kate.” I sighed. “You’ve been holding back this whole time. You haven’t encouraged him at all. That’s all he needs, a bit of encouragement from you.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.” I tried to sound more confident than I was. “He’s right on the edge. Push him, and he’ll fall for you.”

“Then… then… you really don’t like him?”

I pressed my lips together. Kate sounded so desperate for hope. It was impossible to her that anyone might
not
want Dylan Chase.

“Kate, Dylan is all yours.”

She looked up at me.

“Then you have to stay anyway.”

“Kate—”

“You have to stay!  Because then when he picks us for the top two, you can walk away with the money. If you leave now, Mia will get it.”

I burst out laughing.

“Stay just to spite Mia? I wish I could.” For a brief second, I thought about it. It was a good chunk of money, after all, even if it meant throwing away my career. But it wasn’t guaranteed. “I need to get back to work.”

My phone rang.

“See? That’s probably my boss now,” I said. But it wasn’t Clarence calling.

“Hey dorkface,” I said.

“L—Lisa?”

“Em? What’s the matter?”

“I’m calling from the hospital,” she said. Her voice was unsteady, high-pitched. It sounded like a little girl’s voice. “It’s Arlen,” she said, choking out the words. “Lisa…”

Her voice broke off, and I could only hear a muffled sniffling. My heart stilled in my chest.

“Em? Emma, what is it?”

Kate looked at me with a worried expression. I was helpless to do anything but listen to an empty phone.

“
Emma?
”

“It’s Arlen,” she said again. “Oh, Lisa. I don’t know what to do. They did the blood tests.”

“And?”

A strange uncertain dread twisted up in my chest, as if I knew what she was going to say before she said it.

“It’s cancer,” I heard my little sister say, the words sputtering out in between the sobs like a candle in a room without air. “My baby has cancer. Lisa, what are we going to do?”

Chapter Thirty-Three

My tongue caught in my throat.

What are we going to do?

Emma had always looked up to me for help. I remembered once when I was eight and she was six, and we’d been stuck inside on a rainy day. Indoor tag was a bad idea, and we’d knocked over one of my mom’s wine glasses, one of the special ones that had a flower impressed into the base of the glass.

It had shattered, the glass pieces sliding over the cheap linoleum kitchen floor, and we’d both frozen still. And Emma had looked up to me, her girlish eyes wide and uncertain.

What are we going to do?

I always had the answer, and whenever we got in trouble, I was the one to get us out of it. We’d swept the pieces of glass up and thrown them away in the outside trash, my sister holding the pan while I swept, telling her to mind the small shards. “Get rid of the evidence,” I’d said, and it had worked. My mom had forgotten all about the wine glass on the counter, and when she finally looked in the cabinet days later and saw that there were three glasses there, she hadn’t suspected her girls for more than a second.

But this time, I had no answer. There was nothing I could do to fix this, and I realized that I was squeezing the phone so tightly my hand hurt.

“Lisa?”

My sister’s voice, pleading.
Do something. What are we going to do? Lisa? Lisa?

“I’ll be right there.” I hated the promise in my words, hated that I was expected to fix the unfixable. Hated that something so unfair and terrible had happened to my family. I hung up and put the phone in my purse shakily.

“Lisa? Is everything okay?”

I looked up at Kate. She knew something was wrong. I shook my head and stood up. I couldn’t talk about this now.

I didn’t know what I was doing, and I had to sort things out. Nothing made any sense.

“I—I have to go.”

“What about your stuff?”

My bag was packed, clothes spilling out. I’d bought too many dresses during the contest, and they didn’t fit. Anger pulsed through me. Arlen had been sick, and I’d been here doing stupid contests in stupid dresses. Playing fashion while my niece had cancer.

I hated everything at that moment, hated the dresses and the competition, hated that I’d been torn up over a guy of all things.

“I’ll be back for it,” I said, and left before she could ask any other questions.

“Emma?”

I poked my head through the doorway. Emma and Arlen were sitting together on the hospital bed, reading a book. Emma’s eyes were red, her cheeks blotchy from tears.

“Come in,” she said. “We were just reading
Madeline
.”

“Lah,” Arlen said, her small hand reaching for the page in front of her grumpily. Her arm had a bandage wound around her elbow, and there was another bandage on her hip.

“She’s already speaking French,” I said, smiling weakly. “Well done.”

Emma turned the page and read: “In the middle of the night, Miss Clavel turned on her light and said,
Something is not right.
” Emma closed the book with a note of finality.

“Is that the end?”

“If you say the words like you’re reading
The End,
she doesn’t even notice,” Emma said. She pressed a kiss on the top of Arlen’s head. Arlen slumped down against Emma’s chest, burying her small face against her mom.

“She’s tired,” Emma said.

“I bet.”

“They had—they had to put her under to take a bone marrow sample from her hip.”

I swallowed hard. “What kind of cancer is it?”

“Acute lymphoblastic leukemia,” Emma said, pronouncing the words like they were in a foreign language. I guessed they were. Soon she would be speaking that language, though—all of the words for the diagnosis and symptoms and treatment. I shook the thought from my head.

“Do they know—like, what stage it is?”

Emma shook her head.

“I guess it doesn’t work like that for this kind,” she said. “It’s in the bone marrow, and that’s everywhere. So there’s not like, Stage One or Stage Two or whatever. It’s—I don’t know. The doctor was trying to explain it to me but I couldn’t really focus.”

Tears welled in her eyes. I reached for her and wrapped her up in a hug with Arlen between us.

“It’s alright,” I said. “It’ll be alright.”

“Will it?”

I looked down at my little sister.

“I can’t promise anything,” I said. “Except that we’ll do everything we can to help her.”

“The doctor said there might be a special treatment that wasn’t covered by the insurance, I don’t know if we can afford—”

“Don’t worry about the money,” I said firmly.

“But—”

“I’ll take care of it,” I said, even though I didn’t know how I would. “I will figure something out. What happens next? Did the doctors say?”

“They have to do a spinal tap on her,” Emma said, her voice shaky. “To see if it’s in her nervous system and to see if they need to do radiation. And they’re going to start her on chemotherapy. Intra—intra-something chemotherapy. And we both need to get tested to see  if we match for a bone marrow transplant, if it gets that far.”

Emma looked up at me. There was a strength in her that I hadn’t ever seen before. Even with tears in her eyes, I could see that she was going to do whatever she could do help her baby. Like an animal cornered, she was going to fight like hell. How could she be so strong through her tears? I felt as though if I started crying, I would break down completely.

“Will you get me some things from home?” Emma said. “We’ve been stuck here for a day, and I didn’t want to leave her alone.”

“Of course,” I said, desperate to feel helpful. “I’ll get them and be back with dinner.”

“I fed Mac before we left, but he’s probably yowling by now.”

“Maybe Jessica can take him for a few days while we get everything sorted out.” Jessica loved our cat, even though Mac didn’t return the favor.

“Sounds like you have it all figured out,” Emma said softly.

“Right. Just leave it to Lisa.”

Outside of the hospital room, I ran into a doctor coming in.

“You’re Arlen’s doctor?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“You must be Lisa. Emma’s been talking about you. I’m sorry about your niece.”

“Thanks,” I said, struggling to keep the tears from coming out.

“She’s on your insurance, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Emma mentioned something about special treatment. I don’t know if you know anything about that.”

“There are many different treatments available, but some of them aren’t covered by insurance. We’ll know within forty-eight hours what the results of the blood tests are, but the initial results weren’t good.”

“Not good?” Of course they weren’t good. She had cancer, didn’t she?

“There are a lot of cancerous cells. She’s very, very sick. If we see that the cancer is already developing in Arlen’s central nervous system, I’d like to start her on a type of early CNS prophylaxis we’ve been developing here with good results.”

“That’s the kind not covered by our insurance?”

“That’s right. If you’re able to pay for the treatments out of pocket, we can start immediately. Otherwise, we would need to wait until we see the results of the conventional chemo before being able to move on to more extreme treatments.”

She took a breath, waiting as if to see what my reaction was before continuing.

“Let me be clear. This is the worst case scenario, but all signs point to the likelihood that Arlen’s cancer has spread farther than we’d like.”

Worst case scenario.
Here, I’d thought cancer was the worst case scenario. And now the doctor was saying that it was even worse than we’d thought.

“I’d like to have a plan in place just in case we need to start treatment right away, since the initial results indicate it might be necessary.”

“How much do we need to pay if… if she needs what you say she might need?”

“The initial CNS treatments would require upfront payment of around forty thousand.”

“Forty thousand
dollars
?”

My brain went into a whirl. Our savings wouldn’t come close to covering it. Even taking out all of my retirement savings wouldn’t be enough. Even if I sold every damn thing we owned, it wouldn’t be enough.

The doctor was still talking.

“The full course would depend on how she responds to treatment, but the first round usually ends up costing six figures within the first year of treatment.”

I shook my head.

“That’s… that’s a lot.”

The doctor looked at me sympathetically.

“We don’t know what the results are yet,” she said. “And Arlen might end up not needing the radical treatments at all. If you can’t afford them—”

“I’ll figure something out,” I said. “Yes. Plan on doing…whatever it is you’ll need to do. I’ll find the money.”

“You’re sure?”

I didn’t pause.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

“Clarence, I need to talk to you.”

My boss was on the phone. He held up one hand in an impatient gesture.

“Not now, Lisa.”

Anger boiled through my veins. I stepped into his office. So many times he’d waved me off carelessly. And I’d scurried around doing whatever he wanted. Now, though, his nonchalant demeanor frustrated me to rage.

“It’s important,” I said, through gritted teeth.

“Lisa, I said—”

I reached over and plucked the phone from his ear, hanging up. His jaw dropped, and he looked up at me in astonishment.