Page 156 of Love Overboard
The production crew made us look awful.
Not that we were innocent — we were far from it. But the show had attacked not only our character, but our professional abilities, too. They somehow twisted the footage to make me look like a micromanaging perfectionist who was putting all the work on Bernard and Leah as opposed to taking it on myself. I wanted to cry when I saw the post-production interviews where Leah and Bernard were weaseled into sayingjust enoughthat the production team could use it against me.
Bernard had texted me when the third episode aired, apologizing profusely and promising me they’d twisted his words. I believed him, of course — but the damage was already done. Still, it was nice to have at least one member of the crew reaching out to us, and Bernard even came over to watch an episode with us when he was in the States for a tour the show had set up for him. Turned out he’d made quite the splash and had fans demanding more of him.
Bernard was happy to oblige.
The show wasn’t nice to Finn, either. They highlighted thesmallestcomments from the guests about something they didn’t like about his food rather than the mountain of compliments he received all season. It didn’t even make sense. We wouldn’t have had as big of tips as we had if the food sucked. My team wouldn’t have run so smoothly until the very end if I was a bitch.
But it was good television, and the viewing public ate it right up.
The episode we watched when Bernard visited was the one where Finn had his one weak moment of the season and broke down in the galley. But of course, they’d edited out anything soft and sincere between us. Instead, it was all about Finn throwing a fit and then painted to seem as if it was the rest of the crew who saved dinner while Finn and I sat on the floor and did nothing.
Bernard had cringed, shaking his head where he sat next to me on our couch. He had made us strong martinis, and they were all that was getting us through the carnage.
“That was brutal,” he said. Then he smiled, shimmying. “But hey — my arse looksfantastic,dunnit?”
Whenever it got to be too much, Finn would wordlessly turn the TV off and grab for my hand. He’d ground me back in the present moment, in what was real, in who knew me best.
Those were some of my favorite months.
We worked local jobs — Finn at a Michelin-Star restaurant as a sous, and me on whatever charters needed help — and then we’d come home to each other and get lost in the world we were creating. We stayed off social media. We let the rumors fly.
We made our own peace.
But there was no running from the reunion.
It was part of our contracts, thelastpart we had to uphold. The second half of our payment to be on the show would hit our bank accounts within a week, and then we could wipe our hands of this forever.
The buzz of the crowd filtered through the black curtain just ahead of us — muffled cheers and chatter from fans who had waited all season to find out what happened to everyone once the cameras stopped rolling. I’d done my best to stay completely offline, but there were times, in my weakness, that I’d log on just to see what the comments were.
I always regretted it.
The people waiting in that audience, the people watching at home? They wanted my head on a stake.
There were some who loved us, some who cheered us on from the beginning. Maybe they saw what the cameras and production crew tried to hide — that we were in love, that we didn’t mean to hurt anyone, that Gisella wasn’t innocent in all this.
It was easy to saywho cares, but it was harder to watch a lie play out about you and be powerless to stop it.
Knowing my father was part of that viewing audience had been the hardest part of the equation. Fortunately, he’d lost interest after episode three — or so he told me. I had a feeling he knew what was coming even before I did.
He hadn’t said a bad word about it to me, though I knew he had plenty to say. There was no way he hadn’t heard about thescandal.Someoneclose to him would know. We just chose to ignore it whenever we spoke, and I was fine with that.
There was a roar of applause mixed with a very loud symphony of jeers, and I blinked back to the present, my hand sweating where Finn held it tight.
He gave me a squeeze. “Ready?”
“Absolutely not.”
The corner of Finn’s lips tilted up, and he leaned in for a quick kiss on my cheek.
“You and me against the world, remember?”
“Quite literally in this moment,” I mumbled.
He chuckled, gave my hand another tight embrace, and then the showrunners were ushering us through the curtain.
We stepped out onto the soundstage to a cacophony of noise that quickly turned to a ringing in my ears. I tuned out any jeers, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other.
