The finale was today. Two contestants left — me and Julian, because Derek’s access had been revoked after the leak and Mason had been eliminated three days ago with a grace that made the rest of us look like amateurs. In six hours, I’d stand on a stage in front of cameras and forty million viewers and the woman who deserved better than a man who bolted when the ground shook.
I didn’t have a speech. I didn’t have a strategy or a script or any of the careful plans I’d spent my life placing between myself and the possibility of being known. I had a ceiling fan with a broken blade angle and a brother who’d saved an earthquake metaphor for four years and the absolute, unshakeable certainty that Sloane had looked at me — really looked, past the sarcasm and the armor I’d welded so tight I’d forgotten the seams were there — and decided I was worth the fallout.
The least I could do was decide the same about her.
I sat at the desk in my room and opened a blank note on my phone. Ignored the trending hashtags, the scandal, the forty million opinions. I started a list. Every detail I’d memorized, every moment I’d filed away, every piece of evidence that the man my father told me I was and the man she’d found underneath were two entirely different people. The list wasn’t long. It didn’t need to be. The best work I’d ever done was always the simplest — clean lines, honest materials, no pretense about what was holding the weight.
By six AM, the list was done. The mansion was stirring — coffee machines cycling on, the first crew members arriving, the ambient machinery of a production that had no idea what was coming. I pocketed the phone and stood up.
The finale was in six hours. The cameras would be rolling. Derek would be there. The world would be watching.
I was scared. Not the old fear — or not only. The new one, too. The one that came from wanting so much that the distance between having and not having felt like standing at the edge of a roof and looking down. But Declan was right. The things that survive aren’t the ones that refuse to move. They’re the ones that absorb the impact and stay standing.
I looked at the list on my phone one more time. Seven items. She’d probably laugh at the specificity. She’d probably read the third one and do the thing where she pressed her lips together to stop herself from smiling and failed completely and smiled anyway, and I’d know because I’d been watching for that exact failure for ten weeks and I had never once missed it.
I closed the note. Pocketed the phone. Walked out of the room and shut the door behind me without looking back.
The hallway was empty and the morning was cold and I had no idea if what I was about to do would work.
I went to do it anyway.
CHAPTER 14
The Crown
“When he shows the world who he’s become”
SLOANE
The finale set looked like a wedding and a funeral had a baby and given it a production budget.
Twelve hundred seats arranged in a horseshoe around a stage rebuilt overnight — white columns draped in blush silk, enough fresh peonies to bankrupt a small florist. And lighting so perfectly measured that every contestant would look like a cologne ad and I would look like a woman in complete control of a situation that had detonated spectacularly twenty hours ago. The throne sat center stage, reupholstered in fabric that caught the light like liquid gold, flanked by cameras on motorized rigs that could track a flinch from forty feet. The trending hashtags were already cycling — #GoodBoyFinale, #RhysloaneScandal, #QueenSloane — and in the production trailer, a social media coordinator was mainlining espresso and praying to whatever god oversees engagement metrics.
I was backstage in a champagne gown that weighed approximately eleven pounds and required a physics degree to zip, touching up lipstick that was already flawless because my hands wanted an assignment. The crown sat on my head, and every time I caught my reflection in the makeup mirrors I saw a woman who looked exactly like the Queen of a hit dating show. Composed, luminous, camera-ready — a million miles from thewoman who’d stood in a fluorescent hallway last night watching a man walk away while her lipstick was still on his collar.
“Ratings are through the roof.” Tessa appeared beside me with her tablet, headset slightly crooked, vibrating with the focused energy of someone running a live broadcast on four hours of sleep and sheer spite. “The scandal tripled our audience. Every entertainment outlet in the country is covering the finale. We’re simulcasting on three platforms.” She paused, studying my face with the fluency of two decades of friendship. “You look like you’re about to perform open-heart surgery on yourself.”
“I’m fine.”
“You said fine. You never say fine when you’re actually fine. You say great or handling it or I’ve developed a sophisticated coping mechanism involving true crime podcasts and denial.” She set the tablet down and gripped both my shoulders, pivoting me to face her. “Your mascara is pristine but your cuticles are destroyed. You’ve been picking at them since four AM, haven’t you.”
It wasn’t a question. Tessa had known me since we were eighteen-year-old freshmen bonding over a shared hatred of our RA and a shared obsession with early Scandal — she could read my stress levels from my nail beds alone. “Is he here?”
That was the question. The one I’d been circling since four AM, alone in the Queen’s Suite with my phone face-down on the nightstand because looking at it meant either seeing a message from him or seeing nothing from him, and I couldn’t decide which would be worse. He’d said I need to think. He’d walked away. Twenty hours of silence — the longest we’d gone without some form of contact since Week Two, when he’d started leaving his coffee cup next to mine in the kitchen every morning like a territorial claim disguised as a caffeine habit.
“I don’t know,” I told Tessa. “I don’t know if he’s here.”
A complicated expression crossed Tessa’s features — the producer calculating angles, the best friend calculating damage, and underneath both, a flicker I’d noticed more and more this season, a wistful hunger that surfaced whenever she watched someone else’s love story from behind the cameras. She blinked it away before I could name it. “Okay. Regardless. You walk out there, you sit on that throne, you do what you’ve done brilliantly for ten weeks. You’re the Queen. Act like it.” She squeezed my shoulders once, hard. “Sixty seconds.”
I smoothed the gown. Adjusted the crown. Pushed my tongue against the roof of my mouth — a trick a therapist had taught me for stopping tears, which I had deployed more times this season than in the previous twenty-eight years of my life combined. The stage lights hit me as I walked out, and forty million people saw a queen — spine straight, crown catching every spotlight, a woman who belonged on a throne. Underneath: the real woman, counting her heartbeats and scanning the wings for a man who might or might not have decided she was worth the risk.
Julian went first.
He’d always been the frontrunner on paper — beautiful, articulate, so emotionally intelligent it came with talking points and a skincare routine. His speech was immaculate, delivered with smooth confidence, every word tuned to what women wanted to hear, and that flawlessness had always left me reaching for a feeling that kept slipping through my fingers. Like gripping fog. Like talking to the most gorgeous chatbot ever coded.
“Sloane,” he said, and his voice carried beautifully across the hushed studio, every word placed with care. “This experiencehas taught me what it means to show up. You deserved every ounce of my attention, and I hope I gave you at least some of it.”
The audience murmured their approval. Somewhere in the front row, a woman dabbed her eyes. Julian was perfect, and I needed a messier truth, and we both knew it.
