Despite everything, I smiled.
Lila
I love you guys. Thank you.
Seraphina
We love you too. Now go kick some butt.
I set the phone down, wiping my eyes.
“Your friends are pretty great,” Vance said.
“They are.” I took a deep breath. “Esme’s picking up the girls at ten.”
“Good. I’ll tell Ethan we’ll be there by half past,” Vance said.
We lay there for a few more minutes, neither of us wanting to move. The peace between us felt fragile but real—like the quiet after a storm.
Still, I knew what had to be done. I threw back the covers, squared my shoulders, and said, “Let’s go fix this.”
Ethan Prescott’s office was a white two-story bungalow tucked behind a bank, its shingles weathered by sea air and its trim freshly painted.
Vance reached for my hand as we climbed the front steps, his thumb grazing mine in quiet reassurance.
Ethan greeted us at the door himself—mid-fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair cut short and a neatly trimmed beard. He wore a navy button-down and suspenders over charcoal trousers. He immediately struck me as the kind of man who didn’t need to look like a power player because he already was one.
“Lila, good to meet you,” he said, shaking my hand with a firm grip. “Come in. Coffee?”
We declined, then followed him into a cozy office lined with bookshelves. A thick file sat on his desk.
“First things first,” he said once we were seated. “I’ve reviewed your contract with the production company. There’s no clause that gives them creative control over your personal relationships. You’re not in breach, no matter what they’re claiming.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “That’s something.”
“But I have something else,” Ethan continued. “Vance asked me to look into Kenzie Jayne’s background. I started with the usual—public records, business registrations, social media. There’s almost nothing there. It’s too clean. Too curated. Eventually, I found a credit trail that led to a different name entirely.”
He slid a sheet of paper across the desk.
“Anne Gilmore. She changed her name legally in 2016.”
I stared at the name.
Anne Gilmore.
Something tugged at my memory. An image flashed before my eyes of a young woman in the front row of a classroom, heavy eyeliner, a permanent scowl.
“Oh my God,” I said slowly. “I know her.”
Both men looked at me.
“She went to design school with me. When I first met Kenzie prior to the shoot, she mentioned our design-school affiliation, but I didn’t put it together until now. She said she was a few years behind me—but she was actually in my class! We weren’t friends. In fact, she gave me the creeps. Always quiet, intense, watching me constantly. I thought she was just competitive. Or weird.”
“What else do you remember?” Ethan asked.
I pressed my fingers to my temples, trying to pull the memories forward. “There was an incident. My second year. I was preparing for an exhibition. I’d worked for weeks on a design board, but then decided it wasn’t working and pivoted to a different concept at the last minute. I left the first pitch in my cubby.” My stomach turned as I continued. “A few weeks later, another classmate presented something nearly identical. My friends recognized it. Someone reported it. The next day, Anne was gone. We assumed she’d been expelled.”
“She was,” Ethan confirmed. “For plagiarizing your work. Professors verified the designs were yours based on prior proposals.”
