“This isn’t about me being embarrassed. This is about—“ He stops. Starts again. “Phoenix has a way of turning solving other people’s problems into a suicide mission. She’ll dig. She’ll push. She’ll put herself between me and whatever she thinks is hurting me, and she won’t care what it costs her.”
“That’s not the worst trait in the world.”
“It is when the press tour is hanging by a thread and her career can’t survive another scandal.” His voice cracks on the last word—hairline fracture, barely audible, sealed over almost instantly. “Promise me. Tonight, no matter what Dominic says, no matter what comes up. You keep her distracted.”
Lying to her, even by omission, feels wrong in a way I didn’t expect it to.
“Please.” The word sounds like it physically hurts him.
“Yeah.” I scrub a hand over the back of my neck. “Yeah, okay. I’ll keep her distracted.”
Mason nods once, sharp, and walks ahead without another word. His spine is a steel rod. His stride is measured, precise, each footfall placed with the deliberate care of someone crossing a minefield.
The local dive bar smells like spilled beer, fried food, and decades of stories soaked into wood that nobody has ever bothered to refinish.
I duck through the doorway and stop. Not because anything’s blocking my path, but because my brain needs a second to recalibrate. Every bar I’ve been to in the last five years has been a variation on the same theme—bottle service, mood lighting, a DJ booth, and a bouncer who checks your follower count before letting you past the rope. This place has a pool table with duct tape on the felt, a jukebox that appears to predate the internet, and Christmas lights strung along the ceiling that I suspect have been hanging there since well before last December.
Behind the bar, Dominic spots us and raises a hand. He’s wiping down a pint glass with a rag that’s seen better centuries, sleeves rolled to his elbows, tattoo ink catching the neon beer signs in shifting colors.
“There they are.” His grin is wide, genuine. He sets three glasses on the scarred bartop and starts pouring without asking what anyone wants. “Welcome to the finest establishment in Harmony Harbor. Don’t touch the pool table. Drinks are on the house.”
“You really don’t have to—“ I start.
“Shut up and drink.” He slides a dark amber beer toward me, then one toward Phoenix. His hand hesitates—just a fraction of a second—before he places the third in front of Mason. Their fingers don’t touch. But Dominic’s eyes hold on Mason’s face a beat too long, tracking something there that I can’t read. Some silent inventory, like he’s checking for damage.
“You good?” Dominic asks him. The question is casual. The question is anything but casual.
Mason wraps his hand around the glass. “Fine.”
“Cool.” Dominic nods. Already turning to a fisherman flagging him from the other end of the bar. Already moving. But even as he pours a whiskey and makes change and laughs at something a grizzled man in a cable-knit sweater says, his eyes keep cutting back to Mason. Quick glances. Barely perceptible.The kind of thing you’d miss entirely if you weren’t watching for it.
I’m watching for it.
Phoenix has already migrated three stools down, where a woman in a Red Sox cap is asking for an autograph. If Phoenix is bothered, she doesn’t show it. She leans in, all warmth and dimples, and within thirty seconds the woman is digging through her purse for a napkin and a pen.
The girl is a natural performer, I’m not sure she even realizes just how much.
“My daughter is going to lose her mind,” the woman says, hand pressed flat against her chest. “She watches your old show every single day after school. The reruns.”
“What’s her name?”
“Sadie. She’s nine.”
Phoenix takes the napkin and writes something in careful, looping letters. Not just a signature—a whole message. She draws a little star in the corner and hands it back, and the woman clutches it like it’s a winning lottery ticket.
Two men at the next table lean over. One of them pulls out his phone. Phoenix doesn’t stiffen. Doesn’t calculate angles or check for cameras the way she does at industry events. She just turns to them with that same easy openness, asks their names, asks about the festival, asks if the lobster rolls here are really the best in the state, like the sign outside claims.
Within ten minutes she’s holding court at the bar without trying. Fishermen, tourists, a cluster of college-age kids who recognized her from social media—they orbit her like she’s generating her own gravitational field. She laughs at their jokes. She asks real questions and listens to the answers. She steals fries off a stranger’s plate and the stranger lets her.
This is who she is when nobody’s managing her. When there’s no publicist curating interactions, no photographermonetizing smiles, no mother calculating market value. Just Phoenix, being herself, and people falling in love with her for it.
Something tightens in my chest. Not jealousy. Something more dangerous than that. The urge to stand between her and every camera, every critic, every industry vulture who’s ever tried to grind this version of her into something marketable and small.
I force my attention back to Mason.
He hasn’t moved from his stool. The beer sits in front of him, barely touched, condensation pooling around the base. Every time the front door swings open—and it opens often, locals streaming in as the evening picks up—his head snaps toward it. His fingers tighten on the glass. Then whoever walks through turns out to be no one in particular, and he exhales. Sips. Resets.
I slide onto the stool beside him.
