“Yes.”
“You knew when you came here tonight.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t—” I stop. I’m not building a case. I don’t want to build a case. “I’m not angry you didn’t lead with it.”
“But?”
“But I’m looking at a caption calling me a favor, implying I’ve been handing out special treatment to my father’s star pitcher.” My voice is steady, which surprises me. “My studio, Reece. My work. I built that place from nothing. My reputation is everything I have, and now there’s a public question mark sitting over whether any of it is real or whether I’m—”
“It’s not true. Everyone who matters knows.”
“What people who matter know doesn’t change what forty thousand people just read.” I cross my arms over my robe. “It doesn’t change what my father is going to see when he wakes up tomorrow. It doesn’t change what my clients are going to find when they search my name.”
He stands up. “I’ll put out a statement. I’ll—”
“Don’t.” The word comes out sharper than I intend. “Don’t do anything reactive tonight. You told me yourself, reactive moves are bad moves.” I press my fingers to my forehead. “I need to think.”
“Ava.”
“I’m not ending this tonight,” I say, because the look on his face tells me he’s preparing for that possibility, and I don’t have the energy to manage his fear alongside my own. “I’m not making any decisions tonight at all. I need to think, and you need to let me think, and we both need to be smarter than whatever Lena is hoping we’ll do right now.”
He’s quiet for a moment, then he picks up his keys. “I’m going to fix this,” he says. Quiet and absolute, the same voice he uses on the mound when he’s decided a batter is already done. “Not tonight. But I’m going to fix it.”
“I know you believe that.”
“Do you?”
I look at him, the steadiness of him, the certainty, the way he stands in my apartment at midnight with the world arranging itself inconveniently around us and manages to look like a man who has already decided the outcome.
“I’m trying to,” I say honestly.
He crosses to me, cups my face in both hands, and presses his lips to my forehead. Holds them there for a long second, then he steps back. “Lock the door behind me,” he says.
“I always lock the door.”
“Lock it twice tonight.”
He leaves. I hear his footsteps on the stairs, even and unhurried, the way he does everything when he’s keeping himself controlled.
I lock the door. Both locks, because he asked me to.
Then I sit on my couch in my robe in the amber light. I pick up my phone and read the caption one more time.
‘What exactly is being traded for access?’
My hands are steady. My chest is not.
I’ve been here before, not this specific version, but the shape of it. The particular loneliness of something being taken from you by someone who never had any right to it. Someone who decides the story of your life and posts it somewhere you can’t control it, and the way the public nature of it makes the private harm harder to name, hold, and simply feel without it immediately becoming something you have to manage, respond to, and recover from.
I put the phone face down on the coffee table.
The string lights still cast a golden glow—the city hums. My studio is a mile and a half away, dark and locked, the phoenix on my shoulder reflected in every framed design on these walls, and I have built every single thing in my life from the ground up with my own two hands.
No one gets to reduce that.
Not Lena Hart with her burner numbers. Not a sports blog with a misleading caption. Not whatever comes next.
