"Hog."
"Adrian." His voice was level. Controlled. "Where are you?"
"Outside Pickle's building. He's not here."
"I know."
Of course, he knew. Hog always knew. That was his role on the team—the one who understood someone was struggling before they admitted it to themselves. He showed up with knitting and silence and let you fall apart without judgment.
"He stayed at Jake and Evan's last night," Hog said. "After he left the arena."
I closed my eyes. The cold pressed against my face, sharp and clarifying.
"Is he okay?" I asked.
"Define okay."
Fair. I deserved that.
"Is he—" I searched for the right question. The one that would tell me what I needed to know. "How bad is it?"
Hog was quiet for a moment. "Juno called him. Last night. While he was at Jake's."
I swallowed.
"She'd been hearing things. Industry gossip. A documentary coming out of Thunder Bay with viral potential." His voice had an audible edge. "A relatable disaster."
Relatable disaster.
The network's phrase. The angle I'd been fighting.
"What did she tell him?"
"Enough. She asked if he'd seen the footage. What he knew about the direction. Whether he understood what was being done with his image."
I pressed my free hand against the brick wall of Pickle's building, steadying myself.
"He didn't know," I said. "He didn't know any of it until I told him in the storage room. And even then—"
"Even then, you didn't tell him everything."
"No," I admitted. "I didn't."
"Here's the thing," Hog said. "Pickle's not stupid. He's loud, and he talks in weird tangents, but he's not stupid. He sat there in Jake's living room, and he listened to Juno, and he put the pieces together."
I couldn't speak.
Hog spoke barely above a whisper. "And you know what he did? He didn't spiral. He didn't call you at 2 a.m. demanding answers. He didn't show up at your hotel and make a scene."
"What did he do?"
"He decided to give you a chance to explain first."
My jaw dropped.
"He woke up this morning," Hog continued, "and he told Jake he was going to hear you out. That maybe there was more of the story he didn't have. That you'd been trying to tell him something, and he'd walked away before you finished, and the least he could do was listen to the whole story before he decided what to do."
I slid down the wall until I was crouching on the sidewalk. The cold from the concrete seeped through my jeans.
