He ignored her and continued to address me. “I, uh, didn’t realize how much you liked him,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”
I felt mortified. Great. Not only had Guillaume ended any chance I may have had with Gabe, but now he was also under the mistaken impression that I was madly in love with the reporter he’d just scared away.
“It’s fine, Guillaume,” I said uncomfortably, wishing he would disappear. But quite irritatingly, he didn’t. “Anyhow,” I added, “it’s not as though I even liked him that much to begin with.”
The lie felt sour on my tongue, but it wasn’t like I had a choice.
The next morning, the world came tumbling down.
After having taken an evening train back to Paris the night before, Poppy and I arrived at the office early in the morning to see what kind of an impact the junket had made.
At first glance, the coverage was good. The Boston Globe ran a glowing profile of Guillaume that said his music was “like a bottle of fine French wine: smooth, delicious, and designed to make you feel good.” The New York Times ran a piece about how Guillaume—actor, songwriter, singer, and international playboy—was the first real Renaissance man of the twenty-first century. The London Mirror ran a front-page story with a headline that screamed: “Prince William, Watch Your Back! There’s a New Bachelor in Town!”
But there was one glaring problem.
There was nothing on the UPP wires about Guillaume. Or about the junket.
“Gabriel didn’t file a story,” Poppy said after a few moments of flipping through various sites. She looked at the computer screen—and then at me—in awe. “He didn’t file a story,” she repeated.
“Well, at least he didn’t file a bad story,” I said in a small voice, trying to look on the bright side.
Poppy gazed at me for a long moment. “Right, but there’s nothing at all,” she said quietly. “That means that for all the money KMG poured into this, the junket is conspicuously absent from more than two hundred newspapers around the world.”
I gulped. A knot was beginning to form in the center of my stomach. “Oh,” I said quietly. “Right.” In a way, then, no news was even worse than bad news.
The phone rang, and Poppy reached over distractedly to pick it up. The voice on the other end was so loud that I could hear it from where I was sitting. After a moment, Poppy hung up, her face pale.
“That was Véronique,” she said. “She wants to see us both immediately.”
“Oh, Poppy,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
Poppy took a deep breath and tried to smile. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Not yet, anyhow. Maybe all Véronique wants to talk about is the great coverage we got.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were walking in the door of KMG, where we were promptly ushered into Véronique’s office. After nodding at both of us and telling us to take seats, she sat down behind her desk, crossed her arms silently, and looked back and forth between us for what felt like an eternity.
“Poppy,” she finally began in an even tone. “Do you know how much KMG spent on this junket?”
Poppy gulped. “Yes, ma’am,” she said. “It was quite a lot.”
“Correct,” Véronique said. “And do you know why we spent so much money?”
Poppy gulped. “To help promote Guillaume?” she asked uncertainly.
“Well, yes,” Véronique said. “And because you insisted that this junket was the way to do it.”
Poppy cleared her throat. “We got some great coverage,” she said in a small voice.
I chimed in: “The Boston Globe did a great piece. So did the New York Times. And the London Mirror.”
Véronique glanced at me quickly, as if I was an insignificant annoyance, then focused her stare back on Poppy.
“I wondered when I got into the office this morning why, with all that money spent on this, Guillaume Riche was missing from hundreds of papers around the world where you had promised there would be coverage.”
There was dead silence for a moment. Poppy glanced over at me and then back at Véronique. She cleared her throat nervously again.
“I can explain,” she said finally.
“No need,” Véronique said crisply, holding up a hand. “Because I already have this issue answered, you see. When I realized the omission, I thought to myself, Why? Why is there no coverage in more than two hundred papers Poppy promised would carry news of the junket?”
“Véronique, I—”
“Do not interrupt,” Véronique said, again holding up a hand. I felt ill and sunk down lower in my chair, wondering if it would be possible to simply vanish into the upholstery.
“In any case,” she continued, “I began calling around and realized that the omissions were all in papers that rely on UPP content. But, I said to myself, I thought there was a UPP reporter on the list for the junket.”
“Véronique, I—” Poppy tried again.