"Mom, Dad, Frank," I said firmly as we reached them, "I'd like you to properly meet Julian Thorne. My boyfriend. The man I've been telling you about, who you assumed was fictional."
Frank, who had made the quick assumptions when he came by with his son Mike, introduced himself to Julian properly.
"Frank Heathrow," he said, extending his hand cautiously to Julian. "Danny's uncle, Mike's father. I owe you an apology, son. We jumped to conclusions."
"We all did," Julian said, accepting the handshake with characteristic grace. "Though I understand why. The injuries look suspicious without context."
"That's just it," I said, my frustration finally boiling over. "You didn't ask for context. None of you did. You saw bruises and immediately assumed the worst about Julian, about me, about our relationship even when I informed you otherwise."
My parents had the decency to look ashamed, but I wasn't finished.
"And Mom, Dad—what exactly were you thinking, inviting half the town's eligible bachelors to ambush me? Did it occur to you that maybe, just maybe, when I told you I was bringing my boyfriend home to meet you, I meant it?"
"Sweetheart," Mom said weakly, "You have to understand—"
"No," I interrupted. "You have to understand. I'm thirty years old. I don't need you to manage my love life or arrange introductions with men I went to high school with. When I tell you I'm happy, when I tell you I'm in love, I need you to respect that."
Dad cleared his throat. "Vivienne, we just wanted—"
"You wanted me to settle down with someone safe, someone familiar, someone from here," I said. "But that's not what I want. I want someone who challenges me, who sees me as I really am, who makes me want to be better than I was before I met him."
I squeezed Julian's hand, feeling him squeeze back in support.
"Julian is that person," I continued. "And if you'd given him a chance, if you'd trusted me enough to believe that I could make good decisions about my own life, you would have seen that."
The silence that followed was heavy with the weight of years of misunderstandings, of my parents' well-meaning but misguided attempts to protect me from choices they didn't understand.
"You're right," Dad said finally. "We were wrong. About the setup, about not believing you, about..." He gestured toward the lawn where the other men were still recovering. "About all of it."
"I'm sorry, honey," Mom added, tears in her eyes. "We love you so much, and we just wanted—"
"I know what you wanted," I said, my voice gentling slightly. "But I need you to trust that I know what's best for me. And what's best for me is Julian."
Before anyone could respond, Julian's phone rang. He glanced at the screen and frowned.
"It's Kane," he said apologetically. "I should take this."
"Go ahead," I said, watching as he stepped away for privacy.
I could see the tension in his posture as he listened, the way his expression shifted from concern to something darker. After a few moments, he looked back at me with a question in his eyes.
"Hang on, Kane," Julian said into the phone, then moved closer to me. "Vivienne, Kane couldn't track down that photo of you and Rafael. It hasn’t surfaced yet, so even though it’s not much, it is something."
My stomach dropped. "It's still out there?"
"It is," Julian said carefully. "But something happened that Kane thinks could solve this problem. Scarlett was arrested at 3 a.m. this morning—driving under the influence with drugs in her car. She's being charged, and with her legal troubles, the media attention has shifted completely away from us."
I felt a complicated mix of emotions—relief that the photo situation was resolved, but also something uncomfortable about how it had been handled. "Is she okay?"
Julian's expression softened at my concern. "She will be. Kane didn't manufacture the situation—she'd apparently been spiraling for weeks. He just made sure the right people were in the right place at the right time."
"So it's really over?" I asked.
"The photo drama? I hope so. And Scarlett won't be causing any more problems for a while."
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding. "Then maybe we can actually enjoy the rest of this visit."
Julian finished his call with Kane and returned to where my parents and Frank were standing awkwardly, clearly unsure how to proceed after the afternoon's chaos.
