“When I met your mother, she was the heiress to a fortune, and I was the son of a plumber. She ran in society, and I ran snakes through drainpipes. Never in a million years did I think she’d want someone so beneath her. But what you don’t seem to understand is that love doesn’t care where you come from, only who you are. That, and snobbery works both ways. You thumbing your nose at the things she wants is no better than her thumbing her nose at yours.”

“So, what … I should hear her out? Give her a chance to make it right?” I shook my head at the question he never asked, the same one Luke had suggested. The one that just one hour ago, I was willing to take. “If it were just about the other night, that’d be one thing. But a reality show? That’s too big for me to look past.”

“She didn’t exactly say she accepted the offer. Only that she got one.”

I frowned. “No, she said—”

“That she got an offer. That was all. I won’t tell you what to do, but I will say this—I’d hate to see you let love go for the sake of vanity, Kash.”

Before I could argue, he turned and headed back to his post in the zinnias, leaving me with his words ringing in my ears.

Mostly because he wasn’t wrong.

I was running away, so convinced I wasn’t enough that I’d doomed us from the start, turned us into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’d turned my nose up to the life she wanted, what she’d worked for, partly because I hated—desperately hated—seeing her be demeaned. But also because all the things her life represented were patently opposite of mine. And that comparison made me feel less than, even though this life made me happy. It was all I wanted, besides her.

But the show. The thought of her participating in a reality show made my stomach turn, and my heart sank into its waiting arms. She might not have come out and said it, but she’d taken that offer. Everything she’d ever wanted had been handed to her on a silver platter, tarnished with lies and deceit. The devil had made her an offer, and I couldn’t imagine a world in which she’d refuse. I also couldn’t imagine a world in which she wouldn’t have told me right then and there that I was wrong if she’d turned it down.

She had called me an asshole, which wasn’t off base.