“I know,” he said quietly.
“Was any of it real?” The question escaped before I could catch it. “Your father. Losing his business. The drinking. Any of it?” I watched his face for the tell, the flicker of a man caught in another lie. “Or was that just a line you dropped because I went first?”
His composure broke. Not the polished expression of a man who’d spent a decade performing for cameras. Real pain, quick and uncontrolled, that he couldn’t mask fast enough.
“My father drank himself to death when I was nineteen years old.” His voice was low, stripped down to nothing. “That’s not a story I tell for content. That’s not a story I tell anyone.”
I believed him.
I fuckinghatedthat I believed him, because it would’ve been so much easier to file this whole thing undercon artistand move on. Burn the bridge, salt the earth, done. But the way his voice broke onnineteen, that wasn’t a performance. I’d spent enough years around grief to know the real thing when I heard it.
Which made everything worse. Because it meant the connection I’d felt in that barn had been real. Built on actual shared damage and actual honesty, except his honesty had a fifty-million-subscriber-sized crater in the middle of it.
“But you hid who you actually were while you watched me fall apart.” My throat was tightening but I refused to let it show. “Was it for content? Research for your next video?Hey everyone, Fraser Kincaid here, today I made a ranch owner cry in a barn?—”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was it like?” I was close enough now to see every detail I didn’t want to see. The tension in his jaw. The shadows under his eyes. The way his hands stayed open at his sides like he was making a point of not reaching for me. “Because from where I’m standing, you played the regular guy, no fame, no followers, just Graham, so I’d let my guard down. And it worked. Congratulations.”
He was quiet for a long moment. I watched him cycle through responses the way I’d watch a horse decide whether to bolt or submit, the calculation happening in real time, visible if you knew where to look.
“I was scared,” he said finally.
I hadn’t expected that.
“I was scared that if you knew who I was, you’d never see me. You’d just see Fraser Kincaid, the brand, the persona, the guy who does stupid stunts for cameras.” He swallowed. “And then I got to know you, and I kept not telling you because I didn’t want to lose whatever this was. Whatever we were becoming.”
Part of me wanted to soften. The rest of me remembered he’d had days to tell me the truth and chose not to.
“So you decided for me.” I dropped my voice because I’d learned a long time ago that quiet lands harder than volume. “You decided I couldn’t handle it. That I’d see the fame and not the person.” My jaw tightened. “Like I was too fragile, or too naive, or too?—”
I stopped. Because the next word wasbroken, and I wasn’t giving him that.
“You don’t get to make that call,” I said. “Nobody does.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because from what I can tell, you’ve spent ten years pretending for millions of people who don’t actually know you. And maybe you’ve done it so long you’ve lost track of where the persona ends and you begin.”
That landed. I saw it hit, the stillness of a man with nothing left to hide behind.
“The video,” he started.
“Is everywhere. Posted on your official channel. My brother called me at eleven last night to ask why the internet thinks I was making out with Fraser Kincaid in my barn.”
“I didn’t post it. Neither did my team. Jamie swears it wasn’t her, and I believe her. I’m going to find out who did.”
“Great. You do that.” I crossed my arms because my hands were starting to shake. “Meanwhile, every person in this town who finally stopped calling me the Silicon Valley brat with a hobby ranch is going to see that video and decide I’m the woman who got caught with some YouTuber in her barn. That’s the story now.”
“I understand if you want us gone,” he said. “Today. All of us. I’ll have the team packed and off the property by noon.”
“No.”
The word came out harder than I intended.
He stared at me.
“Your group stays through the booking.” I kept my voice flat. Professional. Even though every part of me felt scraped raw. “I’m not punishing your team for your choices.”
