CHAPTER 13
The Doubt
“When he almost loses everything — including himself”
RHYS
She risked everything for me, and I walked away from her in a fluorescent hallway with her lipstick still on my collar and the taste of her still on my tongue. And now I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom in a reality TV mansion at two in the morning with my back against a four-poster bed that cost more than my first car, trying to remember how breathing worked before she’d taught me a new way to do it. The carpet was expensive and pointless beneath me. The ceiling fan clicked on every third rotation — a mechanical fault, asymmetric blade angle, fixable in ten minutes with a screwdriver and a ladder — and I was inventorying its defects at two AM because the alternative was thinking about how her spine had arched off the wall when my mouth found her throat, the sound she’d made when I lifted her, the whispered good boy that had detonated a cavity that I’d spent my entire life bricking over, and if I let those images in they would eat me alive.
Too late. They were already in.
My palms still carried the ghost-impression of her thighs, the silk of her skirt bunched against my wrists, the exact weight of her wrapped around me — physics I’d understand in my sleep, mass and gravity and the force required to hold a woman against a wall while she unraveled you with two syllables. My shirt smelled like her. Vanilla and a sharper note underneath,citrus or neroli, the combination I’d been decoding since Week One like it was a formula I could solve if I just identified the variables, except the formula turned out to be unsolvable because the primary variable was Sloane Mitchell and she defied every model I’d ever built. The collar where she’d grabbed me was stretched, the cotton warped by her fists, and I couldn’t stop pressing my fingers into the distortion — feeling the shape her desperation had left in the fabric like reading Braille in a language that only said stay.
I hadn’t stayed. I’d said I need to think, decisively confusing thinking with retreating, and she’d stood in that hallway with her hair tangled from my hands and her makeup smudged and her eyes holding the expression of having just burned her career to the ground for a man who’d responded by walking away. I could still see her face. I would always be able to see her face. It had filed itself in the part of my brain that stored things I couldn’t delete — my mother packing a suitcase when I was twelve, my father’s mouth forming the word weak. And now Sloane watching me leave while the fluorescent light turned her into an image I would carry for the rest of my life whether I chose to or not.
My phone sat face-down on the carpet beside me. I’d flipped it over forty minutes ago after the screen had become a slot machine of public destruction — every notification a new angle on the same catastrophe, #RhysloaneScandal climbing trending like it had somewhere urgent to be. And a tweet from a verified account with three million followers that said “So the feminist dating show queen was sleeping with her favorite contestant the whole time? We are SHOCKED” with sarcasm that generates engagement because cruelty is a spectator sport and the internet never misses a show.
I’d stopped scrolling when I found the production notes Derek had leaked — Sloane’s handwriting, the margin notes she made in purple pen because she refused to use blue like a normal person, her private thoughts turned into prosecution evidence. Rhys: frustrating, fascinating, probably the most emotionally intelligent person in this house if he’d stop using his brain as a bunker. She’d written that about me. In private. In the margins. And now forty million people had read it, and the comments underneath were calling her desperate, delusional, unprofessional, every word a stone aimed at a woman whose only crime was telling the truth on a show she’d built to find it.
I’d done this to her. Maybe not directly — Derek’s hands had assembled the weapon and aimed it — but I was the ammunition. My presence in her life was the variable that made her targetable, my face in those clips the evidence the internet was using to convict her. The math was simple and brutal: subtract me from the equation and the scandal evaporates. Sloane keeps her show, her reputation, her career. The Queen stays untouchable. And I could hear my father’s voice with the clarity of a man standing in the room — not shouting, never shouting, just that flat Midwestern certainty that landed heavier than any fist.
You’re going to embarrass yourself, Rhys. Embarrass the family. That’s what happens when you let people in.
The truly spectacular irony — the one a generous universe had arranged specifically for my education — was that he wasn’t wrong. I’d let her see. I’d knelt on her bedroom floor and said I choose you and meant it with every cell in my body, and within ninety minutes of that confession the world had detonated around us like the universe was keeping score and the penalty for sincerity was annihilation. My father had spent my childhood teaching me that vulnerability was a deficiency, that feeling wasa failure mode, that the safest man in the room was the one nobody could reach. And tonight the evidence supported every lesson. I’d reached for someone. I’d been reached back. And now everything she’d built was burning because I couldn’t keep my distance.
I got up at some point. Three AM, maybe three-thirty — the distinction felt irrelevant, the same way measuring the temperature in a burning room tells you nothing useful about how to get out. The en suite bathroom was aggressively marbled, every surface polished to mirror-finish, and I ran the sink for ninety seconds because the sound of water was better than the sound of my own thoughts looping — a true crime podcast I couldn’t turn off. I looked at myself and the diagnosis was immediate: shirt wrinkled, collar misshapen from her fists, lips faintly swollen, looking like I’d been making excellent decisions all evening and was about to make the worst one. A scratch on my neck below my left ear — her fingernail, I realized, during the moment she’d pulled me closer, and the memory landed hard enough that I had to grip the vanity because my knees had decided to betray me on a delay. My body was running a highlight reel it refused to pause — the pressure of her mouth against my palm, good boy traveling the full length of my spine, the tremor in her voice when she said don’t go — and each replay cinched behind my ribs with enough force that wanting and suffocating had become the same sensation.
I splashed water on my face. It didn’t help. Nothing was going to help except her, and she was the one person I’d just decided I couldn’t have.
Back in the bedroom, I picked up my phone again — a decision so masochistic it should have come with a consent form — and opened my text thread with Sloane instead of the notifications. The 1 AM exchanges from earlier this week.Can’t sleep. Same. Goodnight, Mitchell. The brevity of them, the restraint, two people constructing a conversation in the margins because the real messages were too large for any screen. And now those margins had been published for everyone to dissect.
I typed I’m sorry. Stared at it. Deleted it. Typed Are you okay? and deleted that too, because asking if she was okay after walking away from her was the emotional equivalent of setting someone’s house on fire and then texting u cold? I was, it turned out, exactly the man my father raised: fluent in retreat, illiterate in repair.
I put the phone down. Picked it up. Put it down. The cycle had the compulsive rhythm of doom-scrolling, except instead of consuming other people’s catastrophes I was manufacturing my own, and somewhere in the back of my skull my father’s voice had merged with Derek’s. You’re not enough for her and You’ll ruin it and The Callahan men don’t do this — until I couldn’t tell whose criticism was whose, and the fact that I couldn’t was its own kind of diagnosis.
I called Declan at three-forty AM because I had exhausted every other option, including lying on the floor, staring at the overhead fan, and considering whether a person could technically resign from a television show via text message and still retain a shred of professional dignity. The phone rang twice. He picked up on the second ring — either he’d been awake or he’d trained himself to answer my calls at speed, and I wasn’t sure which possibility undid me more.
“If someone’s dead,” he said, voice sleep-rough but already sharpening, “lead with that. If no one’s dead, this better be extraordinary, because I have a seven AM client who’s going to make me do wall squats and I need every remaining minute of unconsciousness I can get.”
“No one’s dead.” The words came out flat. Stripped. The tone that existed underneath the sarcasm and the observation and the carefully maintained distance — a man standing in an empty room wondering who’d taken all the furniture. “I’m calling to tell you I’m leaving the show.”
A beat. Sheets rustling, a lamp clicking on. “Okay. Why?”
“Because I’m—” I stopped. Tried again. “Because I broke it. Everything. The show, her career, the—” The words were tangling. I pressed my forehead against my palm and felt the ghost of Sloane’s lips on the same spot — she’d kissed my temple, that last suspended moment before the phone rang, that murmured hi between kisses that had felt like the beginning of a language only we spoke. And the tenderness of that memory inside the ruins of this moment was so unbearable that the next sentence came out wrecked. “Derek leaked footage. Her production notes. It’s everywhere. And it’s my fault, because I’m the one who couldn’t keep my distance. I should have stayed behind the line.”
“Behind what line, exactly?”
“The line between functional adult and man who kneels in a woman’s bedroom and tells her he chooses her and then gets her publicly destroyed within the hour.”
Silence. I could hear him processing — Declan’s operating system ran on emotional data where mine ran on spatial, which made him simultaneously the best and most alarming person to call during a crisis.
“So let me get this right,” he said, slowly. “You told her how you feel. She told the world how she feels. Some asshole leaked footage to make you both look bad. And your conclusion from all of this is that you should flee under cover of darkness like a Victorian gentleman who’s been caught without his gloves.”
“That’s not—”
“That is exactly what you just described. You called me at nearly four in the morning to narrate your escape plan, which, for the record, sounds less like a strategic retreat and more like what happens when Dad gets in your head and starts rearranging the furniture.” His voice had lost the sleepy edge entirely. This was Declan operating — the version of my brother who had spent thirty years studying me with the same intensity I brought to load calculations and had come away with a more accurate reading than anything I’d ever drawn of myself. “What’s he saying?”
“Who?”
