“Hey, firecracker.”
She pulls back, framing my face in her hands, scanning me, checking for damage.
“You look…” She squints. “Better. A little feral. Hot feral. Love that for you.”
I make a helpless sound that might be a laugh. “Thank you?”
“Hey.” Her voice softens. “You’re with us. I’m going to steal you for a while, okay?”
I nod as she loops her arm through mine and glares at Roman.
“You three go sign things and be adored or whatever. I need girl time before I explode.”
“I’m basically a girl,” Roman argues.
“Your primary coping mechanism is buying people cheese fries. You can join later.”
Ezra sighs, already resigned, and gently drags Roman away. Creed gets waylaid by a cluster of teenagers waving notebooks and phones.
And then, for the first time since the set ended, it’s just me and Sloane.
She steers me toward a picnic table tucked off to the side of the coffee tent, away from the main swirl of stalls and people. We grab iced coffees, she pays, glowering at me when I protest, and we sit on the same side of the bench, shoulders touching.
Sloane doesn’t ease in.
“Spill,” she says, bumping her shoulder against mine. “Those video calls and voice notes you’ve sent us are a PG13 version. I want the director’s cut.”
I stare at the condensation sliding down my cup. “I don’t… I don’t want to dump all that on you right after you played. This is supposed to be fun and?—”
She pokes my thigh. “Delaney Jean Rivers?—”
“That’s not my middle name.”
“It is in my heart. Listen to me. We were on tour, not sealed in a bunker. We saw the articles, we saw his statement, we saw the internet do what the internet does. We heard your half answers on the phone. I let you dodge because you sounded like you were hanging on by a thread. But I told you, when we got home, I wanted the real story.”
My throat tightens. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“Anywhere,” she declares with a one-shouldered shrug. “Start with the part that hurts the most.”
That… narrows it down exactly zero.
I inhale carefully. The coffee is cold and sweet and not enough to steady me, but it’s something to hold.
“He blamed me,” I whisper. “The second it went public. I walked into his office, and he was already furious, waving his phone around. Pictures. Headlines. ‘Power imbalance,’‘anonymous sources,’ all of it. He kept saying I’d ruined everything.”
Sloane’s expression sharpens, bright eyes gone flint-hard. “What did you say?”
“I told him I hadn’t told anyone. That I never wanted any of this. That I loved him and we could figure it out. Which is…” I laugh weakly. “Horrifying to say out loud now.”
“It’s not horrifying,” she half whispers. “It’s human. He was older, your boss, and he knew exactly how to make you feel chosen. That doesn’t make you stupid, Laney. That makes him practiced.”
I bite my lip, hard. “He said I climbed into his bed to screw my way up the ladder. That I got ‘attached’ and misunderstood everything. That he only ever mentored me.”
Sloane’s hands clench around her coffee cup. “I’m going to set him on fire.”
I look down at my knees. “He told the owners I’d misread things. That there was no relationship. That he was ‘reflecting on boundaries,’ and I was a confused employee. Then HR called and laid out this… script.”
I can still hear the HR woman’s voice in my head.
