But right now, tonight, in the quiet of my own apartment with the lock turned twice because Reece asked me to, I let myself feel the full weight of being exposed.
It’s the only honest thing left to do.
Chapter Fifteen
Ava
The decision comes at four in the morning.
Not impulsively. Not in the hot, reactive way I’m afraid of, the way that would make it feel like Lena won something. I make it the way I make difficult design decisions, by sitting with all the information until the shape of the only workable answer becomes unavoidable.
I’m on my couch with my phone face down on the coffee table, the string lights are still on, and I go through it methodically. The timeline of the last twelve hours. The blog post. The caption. The word ‘favoritism’sitting above a photograph of Reece leaving my studio, time-stamped, geotagged, given context by a sentence designed to raise a question no answer can fully neutralize.
The photo she had held, and deployed at the exact moment most likely to cause the most structural damage, not to me, not primarily, but to Reece. To the contract. To the clean narrative his career needs right now.
And I’m the mechanism. However involuntarily, however unfairly, I am the thing being used to apply pressure to a man who deserves none of this.
At 4:17 a.m., I pick up my phone and type.
Me:We need to talk. Can you come over at noon?
His response comes in under two minutes, which means he’s not sleeping either.
Reece:I’ll be there.
I put the phone down and watch the city lighten through my window, and I don’t let myself feel anything yet. Feeling comes after. First comes the doing.
He arrives at 11:58 a.m.
Of course he does.
I open the door, he looks at me, and I can see him reading my face, the stillness of it, the specific quality of my control, and the way I step back to let him in rather than toward him. He clocks all of it in the time it takes to cross the threshold, and something in his expression prepares itself.
“Ava.”
“Sit down,” I say. “Please.”
He sits. I stay standing because I need the space to think clearly, and being within arm’s reach of him makes thinking clearly a considerably longer process.
“The posts are still running,” I say. “Three more outlets picked it up overnight. One of them has real reach. The comment sections are—” I stop, because the comment sections are not the point, and I will not let the comment sections be the point. “My name is trending in local sports coverage. My studio is being described as a point of access. Me as a means to an end.”
“None of that is true.”
“I know it’s not true.” My voice comes out even. “You know it’s not true. Everyone who has ever sat in my chair knows it’s not true. None of that changes what it looks like from the outside.” I fold my arms across my chest. “And what it looks like from the outside is what management sees. What your contract negotiators see. What your coach sees.”
He’s very still. Listening, not preparing a counterargument. This is one of the things about him I’ve come to rely on, and I can’t afford to rely on it today.
“I’ve been thinking about this for seven hours,” I say. “And I keep coming back to the same place. You are on the verge of the biggest contract of your career. Your numbers are the best they’ve been in three seasons. You have everything lined up, and the only thing standing between you and everything you’ve worked for is me. The way I look in a caption. The narrative Lena has constructed around us.” I hold his gaze. “I’m not willing to be that.”
“Ava,” he says my name the way he says it when he needs me to slow down. “This isn’t something you caused.”
“Causation is beside the point. Impact isn’t.” I move to the window, needing the distance. “If you lose this contract because your coach is compromised, because management gets nervous, because the media runs a six-week cycle about favoritism and distraction, you will know I was in the middle of it. And I will know. And whatever this is between us won’t survive that knowledge, regardless of how we feel about each other right now.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know myself.” I turn back around. “I know what happens to me when I feel like I’ve cost someone something they can’t get back. I watched my mother spend three years apologizing to my father for derailing a coaching opportunity he took elsewhere because of her. I watched what that does to a relationship. I’m not doing it.”
He stands up and doesn’t come toward me. He reads the room well enough to know I need him to stay where he is, but he stands, the full height of him, and the steadiness of his expression makes the next part harder.
