“I saw her this morning.”
Everything inside me goes absolutely still. “And?”
“She looked wrecked.”
My hand tightens around the phone, knuckles aching with the effort of not showing what it does to me. He keeps going, dragging the truth out of a wound that hasn’t stopped bleeding.
“She had back-to-back meetings with PR. Shebarely said more than a sentence at a time. I don’t think she’s stopped long enough to eat.” His voice softens. “She won’t let anybody take the narrative, but she’s breaking herself trying to hold the line.”
My jaw clenches so hard it hurts. “Has anyone actually checked on her?”
“I have,” he says gently. “She won’t talk. Not about last night. Not about you. She tensed up the second I asked if she was okay.”
“She asked about me?”
“No,” Cooper says, and somehow the gentleness in his tone makes it worse. “But she didn’t have to.”
There’s a silence so heavy it feels like it presses my ribs inward, like my lungs don’t know how to expand around it. He lowers his voice even more, almost brotherly in a way he doesn’t show often.
“She’s not okay, Kyle. And whatever you’re feeling right now, it’s the same storm. She’s standing in the other half of it.”
I close my eyes, and everything inside me turns over, anger and love knotting together until there’s no way to tell where one ends and the next begins. Thankfully, he doesn’t push.
“I’ll send you a link for a virtual meeting in a few, we can talk more then. Be careful today.”
The call clicks off, and I drop the phone onto the mattress and stare up at the ceiling like maybe the plaster knows what to do with me. The condo is quiet in that hollow way it gets when you’ve been awake too long, and nothing in you feels settled. Every sound feelstoo sharp. Every breath feels like I’m trying to pull air through bruised lungs.
I try to stretch, to roll my shoulders, to get up and make coffee, but nothing sticks. The anger from earlier has dulled into something heavier, coiling behind my ribs like it’s waiting for the next strike. I spend most of the morning in a daze, wandering the condo without purpose, picking things up only to set them down again, and watching cars crawl along the main road below. Trying to lace my thoughts into something coherent and failing every time Alycia’s face flashes behind my eyes.
She’s not okay.Cooper’s words loop, over and over, until I’m leaning forward against the counter like I might fold in half beneath the weight of them. Knowing she isn’t fine, that the distance is hurting her, too, should help, but it doesn’t. Not the way I thought it would, in some vindicating way that balances anything out. It just makes everything burn deeper. It sets every moment from the last few weeks on fire until I can barely breathe from the smoke of it.
When our Zoom meeting starts, I stare at my laptop as if it’s a punishment. Janine’s expression is the professional concern people wear when they’ve been prepping for disaster-control meetings all morning.
“Kyle,” she says carefully, like she knows I’m hanging on by a thread. “Before we discuss next steps, are you capable of handling this conversation?”
“I’m here,” I answer, which is technically the truth.
She nods, tapping her pen once. “Your walk-off from the interview is being framed as emotional instability. The charity footage is being dissected. The parking garage stills are everywhere. We have rising speculation that the relationship was a PR fabrication gone wrong.”
“And Alycia?”
“She’s fielding a lot of the blowback. People are putting things on her they shouldn’t.” Janine hesitates, and that hesitation is worse than any spoken answer. “I want to be clear; Alycia didn’t ask for protection. She’s not claiming victimhood. But the comments aimed at her are… misogynistic and dangerous.”
My hands curl into fists at my sides. “Does she know how bad it is?”
“She knows enough,” Janine says carefully.
That’s when something inside me cracks, deep enough to change the shape of the air in my lungs.
“We are not throwing either of you into the fire. The plan is to stabilize the narrative until we know what story you two want to tell.”
The story we want to tell.As if we’re capable of wanting the same thing right now. By the time the meeting ends, my chest feels scraped raw.
I spend the afternoon pacing my condo again, fighting the urge to run to her door, to force the conversation she needs space for, to be what she needs even if I’m the last thing she can handle. Every time my hand twitches toward my keys, I pull it back like touching fire.
I told her I’d wait, and I meant it, but waiting withnowhere for the ache to go is its own kind of hell. I’ve spent most of the day replaying her voice in the garage, the way she whispered like every word scraped along her skin on the way out. Until I find myself standing in my doorway with my keys in hand, staring at the elevator button before forcing myself back inside. The team doesn’t want me at practice. The franchise doesn’t want me anywhere public. PR wants me invisible until they figure out how to clean up the mess. I understand why, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to sit still.
The sun goes down, and the condo grows dim around me. I’m still pacing, still checking my phone every five minutes, even though I know she won’t text. I rub the back of my neck, gripping at the tension that’s been building for hours. The only thing I can do is wait and hope she isn’t slipping further away while I’m trapped here doing nothing.
