A Billionaire for Christmas

His smile lifted a little more, but it was still kind. “It didn’t come up.”

“It’s a really common last name. There are a thousand Clarks all over southern New Mexico. I mean, it’s in the top twenty-five most common last names in the U.S. and, like, number fourteen in Scotland. Over a million people in the U.S. have the ‘Clark’ surname, and then there’s a bunch in England, Scotland, and Wales, too. There’s a Clark University and a Clarks shoe store. It’s as common as mud.”

He smiled. “You’ve looked into this.”

“There is not a lot to do on a southern New Mexico sheep ranch on weekends at night, and my parents were always proud of their name. So, yeah.”

“Do you have any pictures of Victor?”

“Um, I suppose, if I can access them. I don’t know if I can get to my cloud storage.” She grabbed her phone from where it was lying on the countertop and turned it on. As soon as it powered up, she pulled up the main settings menu and turned off the Wi-Fi so Francis couldn’t call her again.

It took just a second to scroll through her pictures—swiping quickly past the hundreds of pics of her with Francis—to find pictures of when she’d driven down to Tucson last month. She did that a lot on her days off because, in addition to seeing her sister and nephew, she also went to Victor’s therapy clinic with them to talk medicine with his therapists. Medical practitioners can get impatient with people outside the discipline, so Dree went with Mandi to ask the hard questions and then interpret the answers later for her.

She found a decent one of her holding onto Victor and grinning. He was just a little blurry from thrashing around while Mandi took the picture. She turned around the screen to show it to Augustine.

He looked at it and reached for her phone. “May I?”

“Sure.”

He took the phone out of her fingers and studied it. Then, he tapped it once and scrolled by moving his finger up and down.

“Dude, privacy?” she said. “Besides, I’m lying to you about everything.”

“Right, you are,” he said and handed her phone back to her. The pictures app was still open. The top half was pictures of her with Victor and Mandi. Most of the pictures of Victor were less flattering than the one she’d chosen, with Victor striking out or running from them. Mandi usually had her mouth open and was reaching toward him. His thin limbs’ flaccid muscle tone due to autism was evident to anyone who knew what they were looking at.

The bottom half of the screen was filled with pictures of her with her friends and Francis.

It was the most boring photo scroll in the history of time.

“So, that’s him,” she said, her chest tightening again. “That’s Francis.”

Francis’s flat, pale eyes and his dorky, frizzy hair that stuck out like yellow-orange spikes were evident in every photo. His skin on his thin frame was so milky white that it looked like he’d never seen the sun, which is hard to do in Arizona. He slathered fifty SPF sunscreen on every day because sunlight made his freckles worse. He always looked like he’d been dunked in baby powder and smelled like cheap paint.

She said, “I was so stupid.” It was all her own fault. She might as well admit it. “You ready for this? This is how stupid I was. I thought Francis was going to propose to me on this trip.”

“Francis?” Augustine asked.

“Yeah, Francis Senft. It’s a stupid name—too many consonants. I’m better off staying with Clark. So, two months ago, Francis asked me about what I wanted a marriage proposal to be like, ‘in case he did something.’ He measured my ring finger with a piece of string. So, I believed him because I’m an idiot, and I bought us two tickets to Paris for a romantic vacation together because I thought he was The One.”

She wanted to smash then-Dree over the head for being so stupid.

So very, very stupid.

Instead, hot tears filled her eyes again, and she looked down from Augustine and stared at the half-eaten croissant on the white kitchen counter. “How stupid was I, that I believed him, that I fell for everything he said, hook, line, and sinker? I bought the plane tickets. I gave him access to everything I owned. I thought we were going to get married. I always thought I was savvy, that I could take care of myself, but I’m just someone who’s dumb enough to get swindled.”

A hot, wet drip drew a line down her cheek. Then another.

Dree covered her stupid face with her hands, trying to stop crying. She shouldn’t be crying. She’d gotten what she’d deserved for being so stupid.

Warmth touched her hand. Augustine’s fingers slowly slipped around hers.