He squirmed in a way that didn’t quite fit with the YouTube starlet persona. “So I could tell myself I’d be okay too.”

Ah. That was…that was more complicated than I was ready for. “You mean, if he did the same to you?”

It had been kind of the elephant in the room, and now I’d… I dunno. Had I shot the elephant? Had I said, Hey, is that an elephant? Was the elephant now rampaging around stomping on things? I didn’t think it was a stompy atmosphere. Perhaps we were just staring at an elephant and going, Yup, that’s an elephant all right.

There was a very, very long silence. At the end of the very, very long silence, JoJo said, “Maybe?”

And there went my last hope of resenting him. Because—and this wasn’t a self-esteem issue—JoJo had to be worth more than fifty grand, even accounting for inflation. And in his world everything would happen at the speed of Twitter, instead of the speed of the tabloids.

“And I-I don’t think he will,” he continued. “Obviously I wouldn’t have married him if I thought he would.”

At this point, I wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince me or himself. “I figured.”

JoJo picked at one of his perfect nails, leaving a little chip in it. “And we’ve talked about it—we’ve talked about it so much—and Miles really is sorry, even if he’s bad at showing it.”

“Or saying it,” Old Luc pointed out.

Which JoJo completely blanked, either out of politeness, indifference, or the strain of being genuinely upset in the office of a relative stranger. “It almost broke us up when I found out. I wasn’t sure I could trust somebody who could do something like that.”

“Probably too late to say this,” I told him, “on account of that wedding we were both at, but probably you shouldn’t trust somebody who can do something like that?”

JoJo gave a shrug. “Probably not. But Miles was the first person I’d ever met who really felt like he was interested in me for me, not for who I was.”

I sincerely tried to take that at face value and not assume that even if Miles wasn’t interested in JoJo’s YouTube celebrity, he definitely was interested in being married to a hot young twink.

“And the thing is,” JoJo was saying, “if I’d walked away from that, I know I’d have regretted it. So”—he flicked away a flake of glittery nail polish and met my eyes again—“I took a chance.”

What did he want, a medal? Congratulations: You Gave an Arsehole a Second Chance. “Better you than me.”