The anxiety in my stomach turns to acid burning its way up my throat. I need to get out of here before it also turns to a fresh wave of hot tears. I shake my head. “Goodbye, Andrew.”

It isn’t until I’m outside Andrew’s apartment building that I realize I have no idea where I am or how to get home. I end up paying twenty bucks for a rideshare, and the fact that I don’t vomit on the floor of this Ford Fiesta is quite a life accomplishment.

By the time I’m home and have purged last night’s mistakes respectably into the toilet, it’s just before eight. My shift at Roastlandia starts at ten, so somehow in the next two hours I’ll have to figure out how to be a person again and not a wrung-out sponge of whisky shots and puke and shame. God, Greg is going to be cruel when he sees me.

On the tile floor beside the toilet, my phone starts to buzz. I groan.

“Put me on FaceTime, you little minx!”

“Meredith, what’s wrong? I’m sick, and I need to shower before work.”

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” I hear her slam down a pencil. “My best friend apparently got engaged last night, and I had to learn about it from Instagram. That is what’s wrong.”

“Oh. Fuck.”

I go ahead and take a little lie-down on the bathroom floor. “It’s not real. I was blackout drunk.”

“No shit. That barely looked like your face.”

“How did you even see the photos? I thought they were posted on his Instagram.”

“He tagged you, and then you shared them on your story.”

“Have I already said fuck?”

“I can’t believe I told you to find a himbo and you actually did it. And in a classic Ellie overachiever move, you took it a step further and got engaged. We should talk about your perfectionist tendencies at some point, but I’m honestly proud of you.”

“The engagement isn’t real,” I mumble. Everything starts spinning again as I tell Meredith about the two million dollars and the napkin contract and Christmas at his parents’ cabin.

“Let me get this straight,” Meredith says in her lawyer voice. “A man wants to pay you two hundred thousand dollars to be engaged to him for two weeks, marry him, and then divorce him a few months later, and you’re going to say no? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“As my unofficial lawyer, I don’t think you should be advising me to commit fraud.”

“As your official best friend, I am advising you to not be a fool. You desperately need this money, especially since you refuse to tell Linds where she can shove her credit card debt.”

I make a sound oddly reminiscent of a dying raccoon.