“Derek leaked footage,” I said. “Production notes. Everything.” My voice was flat, professional, the tone I used for crisis meetings. I was already compartmentalizing — pushing down the feeling of his lips on my neck and the sound he’d made when I said good boy, sealing all of it in a box marked later because right now I needed to be the producer, not the woman. I straightened my shirt. Fixed the buttons he’d undone. Pulled my hair back.
“He’s framing it as favoritism. Rigged results. I need to handle this.”
“I’ll come with—”
“No.” The word came out sharper than I meant. “This is my show. If you’re there, it confirms the narrative. I need to do this alone.”
He stood in my bedroom, shirt half-untucked, lips swollen, his hair ruined from me — looking like evidence of everything Derek was accusing us of — and I saw the want to help warring with the understanding that helping would make it worse.
“Okay,” he said.
I was already at the door, mind in full producer mode. I paused at the doorknob and turned back. He was still standing where I’d left him, in the middle of my room, and the image of him there — rumpled, steady, watching me leave with an expression that held both love and the early calculus of panic — was going to live behind my eyelids for a long time.
“I’ll fix this,” I said.
I didn’t wait for his response. I walked down the hall to Tessa’s office, where the screens were already filled with carnage, and spent the next two hours becoming the Sloane the situation required: calm, strategic, unshakable. I called an emergency meeting with the network. Reviewed every leaked document, traced the source — Derek’s device, Derek’s access level, Derek’s methodical aim. And when the network asked if the allegations were true, I looked directly into the conference call camera with seven executives on the other end and said the truest thing I’d ever said on behalf of this show.
“Yes, I have feelings for him. No, the results weren’t rigged. Every elimination was documented, reviewed, and approved by the production team. The footage has been edited to remove context, and I can prove it.” I paused. Let the silence carry. “Icreated this show because I believed men could do better. Rhys Callahan did better. I’m not going to apologize for noticing.”
The call ended. Tessa hugged me for three seconds — her version of a standing ovation — and then went back to coordinating with legal. I sat in her office chair, surrounded by screens showing the metrics of my public dismantling — follower count, trending hashtags, the particular cruelty of engagement numbers climbing because people were entertained by my worst night — and checked my phone.
No messages from Rhys.
I found him in the corridor outside the contestants’ wing. He was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, and he didn’t look like the man who’d knelt in my room and said always. He looked like the man from Day One — guarded, remote, the expression of someone calculating distance rather than closing it.
“It’s handled,” I said. “I told the network the truth.”
“I know. Mason called and told me.” His voice was even. Measured. Too measured. “You told forty million people you have feelings for me.” I searched his face for the tenderness that had been there an hour ago. Found nothing — or worse, found the careful absence of everything, an expression wiped carefully clean. “I told seven network executives, who will tell forty million people, yes. It was the truth, Rhys. Would you have preferred I lied?”
His mouth flattened. He looked down the corridor, and I saw his hand move — just slightly, an inch toward me, his fingers uncurling from the crossed arms — before he caught himself and pressed it flat against his own bicep. The aborted reach. The almost-gesture that he couldn’t let himself finish. Such a small motion, slight in the fluorescent light, and it told me everythinghis measured voice was trying to hide: he wanted to hold me, and he’d decided that holding me was the problem.
“You risked your career.”
“I stated a fact.”
“You risked everything.”
“Yes.” I felt the first crack in the armor I’d spent two hours rebuilding. The evening was catching up — the kneel, his mouth on my temple, the murmured hi between kisses, and now this, this man looking at me looking like he’d just calculated how much damage his presence caused and decided the total was too high. “That’s what you do when it matters. You risk things.”
Silence. Long, terrible silence. “I need to think,” he said — three words, delivered with the same flat finality as I don’t kneel, not cold exactly, but careful in a way that was worse than cold, because careful meant he was choosing each word to keep me at a distance he could survive.
“Rhys—”
“I need to think, Sloane.” He straightened, pushing off the doorframe. “About what this costs you. About whether I’m—” He stopped. His mouth did the thing. “I just need time.”
He walked away. Down the corridor, around the corner, through the door to the contestants’ wing, and gone. His footsteps faded until the hallway was empty. And I stood there in the fluorescent light with my hair still messed from his fingers and the ghost of his mouth on my neck and the slow, certain understanding that I had just done the bravest thing of my professional life and the man I’d done it for was retreating into the version of himself I’d spent weeks coaxing him out of.
My phone buzzed. Tessa: Network approved the statement. We’re clear. You okay?
I leaned against the wall. The same wall where, ninety minutes ago — a geological age, a before and after. He’d pressedme against the plaster and murmured hi into my temple and made me laugh while his shirt was half-open and my skirt was bunched at my hips and neither of us cared about anything except the two inches of air between his mouth and mine. The plaster was cold now. Funny how fast a wall stops being warm.
I’m fine, I typed back, because it was the word women used when they were anything but.
I went upstairs. The Queen’s Suite smelled like cedar. The bed was still made — we’d never made it to the bed, and I didn’t know if that was better or worse. On the nightstand, my reading glasses, my true crime podcast still queued, and the lipstick I’d forgotten to cap before he’d knocked on my door three hours ago, before everything. The lipstick was the shade I’d been wearing when he kissed me. I capped it. Set it down. Sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and pressed my palms flat against the mattress and stayed very still.
I’d told the world I had feelings for him. He’d told me he needed to think.
The room was quiet. My phone stayed dark. I sat there until the cedar faded and the mint was gone and the only thing left was the silence and my hands on a bed he’d never touched and the understanding, settling like cold water into every crack, that I had finally stopped performing and the audience had walked out.
