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through the glass doors of Silver’s inner sanctum.
    Silver was attached to her BlackBerry and waved him into a chair. Was that Mattie’s signed contract on top of the pile on her desk, just next to the half-eaten cocktail sausage? Nate’s lips lifted in a smile. This was it, surely. The moment he became an executive producer. He leaned forward in anticipation.
    ‘ We have a problem, Nate.’ Silver fixed her steely eyes on his.
    Nate blinked. That wasn’t what she was supposed to say. ‘A problem?’ he croaked. ‘Didn’t she sign?’
    ‘ See for yourself.’ She threw the papers at him. He reached to grab them but missed and they fluttered to the floor. Nate bent down to retrieve them, already feeling damp patches spreading under his arms. Turning to the last page, he saw Mattie’s signature, scrawled so determinately it almost tore the paper.
    ‘ But she signed,’ he said, looking up at Silver and wondering what was wrong.
    ‘ Sure, she signed all right. Well done.’ Silver’s mouth twisted around the words. ‘But she didn’t fill in the most important bit!’
    Nate was confused . ‘The most important bit?’
    ‘ The men!’ Silver hissed. Spit and a fleck of sausage flew from her mouth and lay glistening on the glass desk. ‘She didn’t complete the part on her ex-boyfriends. Without that, how are we supposed to do the show, Nate? Tell me that. TELL ME!’
    ‘ I’ll sort it out,’ Nate mumbled, his eyes moving back and forth across her face as if the answer was written there. ‘I’ll talk to her. Right now.’
    Silver grimaced . ‘That’s just the problem. You can’t talk to her about it, can you, Nate? If she gets any whiff of interest in her exes, we could blow it.’
    ‘ I’ll come up with something,’ Nate babbled, his mind desperately trying to formulate a plan.
    ‘ We don’t have time for you to monkey around .’ Silver locked onto his glasses with distaste. ‘X-ACT has already started selling advertising slots for the show. As EP – and believe me, if you want to stay one – you’d better find out who those men are, asap.’
    Nate nodded. EP! Executive producer! He’d done it!
    He sat up straight, a broad grin stretching across his equally broad features.
    ‘ I don’t know what the hell you’re smiling about. Just track down her exes. And she’d better have a long list to choose from. The audience needs to care, to invest in these men as much as they do Mattie. If they’re all duds like you – if there’s no chemistry – forget it.’
    ‘ Oh, she has plenty of exes . Don’t worry about that.’ And by the sounds of things, the difficulty would be narrowing down the list.
    Silver rustled around in her desk drawer. ‘Here.’ She handed Nate a business card. ‘Ring him up and tell him I told you to call. He’ll help.’
    Nate stared at the card . Harry Horne, Private Investigator . Because ignorance isn’t bliss. Was Silver for real? Nate hadn’t thought anyone other than jealous TV housewives used PIs. Especially ones called Horne.
    ‘ Go get those men. And if any of them need a little extra – shall we say, incentive – to come on the show, tell them they’ll get half Mattie’s prize money. If she chooses them, of course, and if they stick out the two weeks together until the end.’
    ‘ Half the two hundred thousand? But I already told Mattie she’d get the money. And the contract says–’
    ‘ The contract says she only gets h alf the money. Didn’t you read it?’ Silver bared her teeth in a smile. ‘It’s all in the fine print, Nate, in the Health and Safety part. Nobody reads that shit.’ Silver grabbed the contract and flipped to that section. ‘See?’ She pointed to a clause and handed it back.
    Nate squinted. Yes, there it was, right underneath the bit about the mandatory pre-show psychological assessment:
    In relation to the financial reward, the Contestant shall forfeit half the total amount to the winning Male Contestant to ensure his