Not to hide. The half-open door felt like a question mark, and I was done with questions—asked but not answered.
The laptop on the desk seemed to take up more space now, its closed lid reflecting the gray window light.
Juno had said the industry was buzzing.Viral potential. Meme-ready content. A relatable disaster.
Adrian had saidtrust me.
Both of those things couldn't be true.
I didn't want to do it.
The thought was clear and sharp. I didn't want to open that laptop. I wanted to sit on the bed and wait for Adrian to walk through the door with an explanation that made sense, a version of events where I wasn't the idiot who'd missed every warning sign because I was too busy being kissed.
Trust me, he'd said.
I'm handling it.
I'd asked him directly. Multiple times. And he'd chosen to give me silence dressed up as protection.
That was a violation.
I had a right to know what existed.
I opened the laptop.
The screen woke with a soft glow.
Adrian's desktop was meticulous—folders arranged in a grid, each one labeled with dates and locations. Color-coded. Organized.
Labeled so well that I could understand the thumbnails.
They ran across the top in a long strip. Tiny rectangles, each one a frozen moment. And in almost every single one: my face.
Me laughing. Me mid-sentence, hands blurring with motion. Me on the ice. Me crouched by the Zamboni, fingers pressed against the bolt heads.
Me, me, me. Captured. Catalogued. Sorted like specimens in a collection, bugs pinned to a board.
The folder structure was visible in a sidebar:
The last thumbnail was a folder named "NETWORK CUT — REVIEW".
I clicked on it. Inside: a single video file. Twelve minutes, thirty-seven seconds.
I pressed play.
The first thing I heard was my own voice.
I want to be the kind of player people remember for the right reasons.
It showed interview footage. It was in my apartment with golden afternoon light. I remembered that moment—how nervous I'd been and how badly I'd wanted to say something that mattered.
On screen, my face was earnest. Hopeful.
Then the cut happened.
The image smashed into footage of me spraying water directly into my own face. A cartoonSPLATlayered over it. A laugh track swelled underneath—canned laughter, perfectly timed to land on my failure.
My eyes widened.
