“Rose—”
I hung up before he could finish.
I went to YouTube and searched for Fraser Kincaid, and as I sat in the shadows, staring at my phone, the video started playing. I watched it again. And again.
There I was. In Graham’s arms.
No. Fraser Kincaid’s arms.
A stranger’s arms.
By the tenth replay, my face was wet, and I didn’t remember starting to cry.
CHAPTER SIX
GRAHAM
At some pointaround three in the morning, I stopped pretending to sleep.
Got out of bed. Sat in the chair by the window and stared at the dark shape of Rose’s cabin across the property.
Dex’s voice looped in my head.Tell her tomorrow. Before someone else does.
Tomorrow was already here.
I should have told her in the barn. Should have said the words before she told me about the crash, before she let me hold her, before she looked at me like I was someone who deserved to be trusted. Instead I’d stood there soaking wet, listening to her hand me the most painful pieces of herself, and I’d kept my mouth shut because the truth would have ruined the moment.
Selfish. That’s what it was. Dressed up as protection, packaged asI’ll tell her when the time is right, but underneath all of it, selfish. I wanted her to keep looking at me the way she had. I wanted one more day of being Graham before Fraser Kincaid walked in and wrecked everything.
Rose’s cabin was dark. She was sleeping. She was fine. She’d wake up and I’d tell her the truth and deal with whatever came next.
I told myself a lot of things.
Around four, I gave up on sleep entirely. Made coffee. Paced the cabin, rehearsing conversations that all ended the same way: Rose’s face closing off and a door shutting between us.
Out of habit, I picked up my phone. I’d turned off notifications hours ago, but the screen showed a wall of missed calls.
My hands went still.
I opened the channel app.
For a second, I didn’t understand what I was looking at. The dashboard numbers were wrong. Wildly, impossibly wrong. Subscriber count had spiked by over three hundred thousand since yesterday. Real-time views were running at a rate I hadn’t seen since the Kilimanjaro episode. The analytics graph looked like a heart attack.
But we hadn’t posted anything. We’d been dark for days. There was nothing on the schedule.
I scrolled to the uploads.
And there it was.
Posted yesterday. Uploaded from Jamie’s credentials. Already sitting at three million views with a trajectory that said it was just getting started.
The thumbnail was Rose.
Rose in my arms. In the barn. The moment she’d slipped and I’d caught her. Her hands on my shoulders, my hands at her waist, our faces close enough that from the right angle it could look like something it wasn’t.
The caption read:
Fraser Kincaid’s Mystery Girl — Who Is She?
