I swallow. “She said it didn’t mean anything, Mere.”

“But you already knew it didn’t,” she tells me gently, “and I thought you said you were over her.”

“I totally am.”

I totally am not. But I want to be, so badly, and isn’t that kind of the same thing?

“If you’re over Jack, I don’t see what the big deal is with this arrangement,” she says. “Who cares if you slept with your fake fiancé’s sister?”

Despite the absolute ridiculousness of that sentence, she does have a point. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter…”

Meredith pauses. “You’re really over her, then?”

“Mmm,” I say. It’s either the beginning of the Campbell’s Soup slogan, or the least convincing syllable in the English language.

“Okay. It’s decided.” Meredith delivers this verdict with finality. “You’ll stay with Andrew at the cabin for eight more days and pretend to be his fiancée. For the money. And for the creative material, honestly. I can’t wait to read the next episode of this new webcomic. Did you see the numbers on the first episode? People really love a fake-dating trope. Or is this more marriage of convenience?”

I ignore her. “Okay,” I say, strengthened in my convictions. Jack be damned. This is about two hundred thousand dollars. I can’t allow a silly crush to ruin my chance at two hundred thousand dollars.

I can totally be over her. But just to be safe, I can also totally avoid her in this giant house for the next eight days.

The “avoiding Jack” plan lasts all of five minutes, four of which I spend uploading the second episode of The Arrangement even though it’s more of a sloppy draft than a finished product, since I did it in five hours hunched over a washing machine. I try not to think about the people on the other side of the screen, but Meredith is right: tens of thousands of people read the first episode.

I slide my iPad back into its case and hop off the washing machine in search of breakfast. It’s almost nine now, and I can hear someone banging around loudly in the kitchen. When I come up the stairs, I see that it’s her.

Jack is wearing an apron over a “Stop Asian Hate” T-shirt with AirPods sticking out of her ears. She’s sifting flour, so her head is bent low, a lock of hair falling across her face. She hasn’t noticed me yet. She’s preoccupied with measuring her flour on a small kitchen scale, bobbing along to an unheard song.