His Signal Played Favorites

Jason Collier was an RV vlogger with over ten million followers. He was also my fiancé. He spent more than half the year in Northreach, a remote stretch out west with empty desert highways and snowcapped mountains. He said the backcountry had zero signal, so going MIA for two weeks was totally normal. I bought it. To bankroll his road trip across Radenska, I mortgaged the apartment we were supposed to live in after the wedding. I helped pay for the RV build, his crew, and the channel that made him famous. He promised once the trip blew up, he'd come home and marry me. So every day, I checked the weather, scared he'd get buried in a blizzard, flip the RV, or die alone out there. Then a local travel creator named Mabel Jibb dropped a new video. Jason was standing on top of a sixteen-thousand-foot mountain, using the satellite phone I'd bought him to livestream the sunrise over the snow-covered peaks for her. Mabel whined that she was cold. Jason turned the camera away right away and spent the next half hour babying her. That same day, I came down with acute appendicitis. The pain hit so hard, I dropped to my knees outside the ER. I sent him ninety-nine messages. He ignored every single one. Turns out, the backcountry never killed his signal. Just mine. From that day on, I stopped mailing him freeze-dried meals. Stopped paying the RV loan. Stopped taking his collection calls. And stopped sending him three safety reminders a day. Not long after, a towing company stopped his RV at a rest stop. That finally got him to call. "Why'd you stop making the RV payments?" No hello. No asking how I was. I snapped a picture of the collection notice and termination agreement and sent them over. "Because starting tomorrow, the RV, the channel, and your ten million followers aren't my problem anymore."