“If I were just some woman in a small town?” I tilt my head. “Sure. I think I’d be someone like you. Kind. Trusted. The girl people go to with their secrets.”
She beams, glowing under the spotlight of my fake admiration. She doesn’t know that’s already what I am. People always give me their secrets. I just use them better.
Harper trusts people the way toddlers trust open staircases—no armor, no exits, just wide eyes and good intentions. I don’t fantasize about toppling queens. I think about the unguarded ones, the girls no one taught to lock the door. The thought hums, warm and dangerous: she’d never see it coming. And there’s something intoxicating about that kind of quiet power—like holding a secret you don’t even have to use.
Harper heads back to her AirBnB in Ojai—long weekend, ‘creative retreat,’ she called it, like the word retreat isn’t already a confession. Tomorrow we record an episode in her sunlit living room, all white walls and canyon views, perfect for the story we’re spinning.
Once she’s gone, Blake leans in the doorway, arms crossed, watching me.
“She tell you anything useful?” he asks.
I shrug. “Her mom’s a drunk. Her sister’s estranged. She’s a bleeding heart who thinks you can fix trauma with kale smoothies and sound baths.”
He chuckles, pushes off the doorframe, and wraps his arms around my waist. “You’re brilliant, you know that?”
“Obviously.”
“I mean it,” he says, brushing my hair aside and kissing the back of my neck. “You’ve got half the country convinced you’re some broken little dove who just wants peace and quiet out here in the Santa Clarita Valley.”
“And the other half thinks I’m a serial killer,” I smirk, turning in his arms. “It’s kind of perfect.”
He kisses me then, slow and deliberate, like he wants to brand me with his mouth. And I let him. Because Blake is useful. Blake is loyal. And Blake doesn’t flinch when I talk about pain.
When he pulls back, his lips hover near mine. “We could still do it. Run. Say fuck it. I’ll follow you anywhere.”
I tap a finger against his chest. “You’d get bored.”
“No,” he says. “You’d get bored. Without the show. The adoration. The headlines.”
I grin. “You know me so well.”
We fall into bed later, tangled limbs and breathy dirty talk. He pins my wrists above my head and whispers things I can’t repeat in daylight. When we’re done, he lies beside me, heartbeat thudding through his skin like a drum.
“Do you ever think,” he says into the dark, “that Harper might suspect you?”
I roll over, pin him with a look. “Of what?”
He raises a brow. “Take your pick.”
I press my lips to his jaw. “Harper trusts me like a cult leader. She thinks I’m the second coming of misunderstood womanhood.”
“And if she ever changes her mind?”
I trail a finger down his chest. “Then I make sure she never gets the chance to tell anyone.”
Blake laughs, sharp and delighted. “God, I think I love you.”
I smile. “I know.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Shae
The chapel smells like old wax and incense, a heady scent that sets my teeth on edge. I explored the bell tower yesterday, following a draft that tasted like ocean salt even this far inland. There’s a narrow staircase that spirals up like a seashell. The hinges on the old iron door that was meant to keep intruders out is rusted and easy enough to push through with my shoulder. The wood of the banister was worn smooth where hands have slid over it for decades: priests, sisters, girls sent here with swollen bellies and secrets, women who came to hide from men and found themselves hiding among the cloisters.
It’s funny, the way silence feels holy to people who’ve never had to be quiet to survive.
The chapel sits below the bell tower, accessible through a side door that’s supposed to stay locked. It isn’t locked. Of course it isn’t. People who rely on God for protection tend to get sloppy about actual security.
