His face went pale. "I didn't know what they were going to do with it when I sent—"
"But you knew this morning. You knew when I was on your floor with your hands in my hair." My voice cracked. "You knew, and you said soon. You said trust me. You let me walk out of there feeling like—"
I couldn't finish the thought out loud.
Like I mattered. Like someone finally saw me and stayed anyway.
Adrian stepped toward me, one hand half-raised, reaching for something—my arm or my face, some part of me he could still touch. I watched him catch himself mid-gesture. His hand hovered in the air between us like he'd forgotten how it worked. Then it dropped to his side, empty, useless.
"I was trying to fix it," he said. "I have a counter-plan. Another production company. I've been threatening to go public with evidence of their manipulation, and I thought if I could just—"
"You've been fighting them," I said slowly. "For days."
"Yes."
"By yourself."
"Yes."
"Making choices about my life. My footage. My image." I swallowed. "All without telling me any of it."
He had no answer.
"You held on so tight." The words came out in a hissing whisper. "You were so scared of losing me that you crushed the only thing that could have saved us."
He flinched like I'd hit him.
"That's not—I was trying to protect—"
"Protection without honesty isn't protection, Adrian." I heard the words leave my mouth and watched them land, watched his whole body absorb the impact. "It's control. It's you deciding you know what's best for me. It's exactly what you did before. What you promised yourself you'd never do again."
Silence.
Somewhere in the building, a door slammed.
"You're right." His voice wavered, wracked with emotion. "About all of it. I've been doing exactly what I did before, and I told myself it was different because—" He shoved his hands back in his pockets. "Because I love you, and I thought if I could fix it first, you'd never have to know how bad it got. You'd never have to know I was the one who—"
"Who what?"
His eyes were bloodshot, wet at the edges.
"Who put the camera on you in the first place. Who saw all those things you do to hold yourself together and thought it would make beautiful footage." His voice cracked completely. "Who fell in love with you while documenting your pain for strangers to consume."
Because I love you.
It should have mattered more. It should have landed with warmth and weight.
Instead, it felt like a confession extracted under pressure. True, maybe, but buried under so much wreckage I couldn't hear it.
"That's not how this works," I said. "You don't get to love someone and lie to them about their life at the same time. Those aren't the same muscle."
"I know." He stepped toward me again, hands raised, and I stepped back. He stopped. "I know that. I just—I didn't know how to tell you. I kept thinking if I had more time—"
"More time to decide what I could handle. More time to edit me out of my own story." My jaw ached from clenching. "You asked me to trust you. Over and over. And the whole time, you didn't trust me at all."
He had no answer.
I was so tired. The game had taken everything I had, and now this—standing in a storage alcove with a man who said he loved me but couldn't stop managing me long enough to let me be me.
