LOGINAvery's POVThursday morning I woke up in my bed.I had made it upstairs at some point in the night, though I had no memory of getting there. My alarm went off at seven thirty and I turned it off and lay there looking at the ceiling.I picked up my phone.Nothing from Liam.I checked twice, hoping the second check would return something different. Both checks returned the same result. No message. No missed call. The last notification with his name on it was from before Wednesday. Before any of it.I got up.I showered. I dressed. I made coffee and drank it standing at the counter because the kitchen table felt wrong so early in the morning. I checked his window. His curtains were open. He was up.I picked up my bag and went to class.I had a class which started at nine. I had a seat I always took, third row from the front on the right side, the seat I had been in since the first week of term. Liam's course was across campus but we shared this lecture once a week, the same way we share
Avery's POVI slept on the kitchen floor.Not intentionally. Lying there became sleep at some point and I woke up at six forty-three with my cheek on the cold tiles and my jacket still on. Everything in my body was making the case against kitchen floors.I got up.I made coffee.I stayed at the table with my phone. Nothing from Liam. Nothing from Jade. The notifications were from the campus forum and three group chats and a news alert about something I did not care about. I turned the screen over, put it face down, and drank my coffee.At eight seventeen my phone rang.Not a number I had saved. A Crestwood area code. I stared at it for two rings before I picked up."Avery." The manager's voice. He was the man who had run the Velvet Underground for the last nine years and who I had signed my first booking contract with almost nine months ago at a table in the back office with a pen that had run out of ink halfway through. "I am calling to check in. Last night was clearly difficult, loo
Avery's POVI changed alone.The dressing room was empty because the other performers had either finished and gone home or to the bar, or were waiting for their turn to perform. I was the only one in costume in the room at that time in the changing room. I took the wig off first. Pins out, one by one, the way I had done it hundreds of times. The wig went into the bag. The costume came off. My clothes went back on and I settled in front of the mirror and looked at my face.My actual face.No mask. No wig. Just Avery. Just Avery Nash in a dressing room in a club where almost nine months of careful separation had just collapsed in three to five seconds on a Wednesday night.I picked up my phone.I opened Liam's name.I held my thumb over the call button for a full thirty seconds.I put the phone back in my bag.I could not call Liam to come and pick me up from the place where everything had just fallen apart. I could not get in his car and look at his face and have him drive me home from
Liam's POVI drove home.Not to her door. I drove to my own door and stayed in the car with the engine off and the street quiet around me, and then I went inside.I did not turn the lights on.I went to the kitchen, pulled a chair out at the table in the dark, put my hands flat on the surface, and stayed there.I did not know how long I stayed before my phone rang. Long enough for the house to go cold around me. Long enough for the street outside to go from the occasional car to nothing. Long enough for it to feel like something done rather than something still happening.Tate's name appeared on the screen.I answered."Talk to me," Tate said.I turned the phone over in my hand and looked at the dark wall and thought about where to start. There was no clean place because the whole thing ran together."It was her," I told him.Tate was quiet."The mask fell," I told him. "During he performance. It came off her face and the lights were on her and I was at the bar and I saw her face." I
Avery's POVHe was in the doorway and his face was already past the question.Nikki disappeared. I did not see her go. One moment she was in the corridor and the next she was not, and none of that mattered because the only thing that mattered was Liam standing six feet away with the backstage door open behind him and his eyes on my face.My uncovered face.The wig was still on. The costume was still on. But the mask was in my hand and nothing stood between what he was seeing and the woman he had been with since autumn, that was nearly three months ago.He now knew.I could see it. He didn't look surprised to see me here. The recognition had not just arrived. It had obviously happened out in the audience when the mask fell and the lights hit my face, he must have been in the audience watching it happen. He probably came backstage to confront me about it."Liam," I started.He did not move."Are you Scarlett?" Liam asked.His voice was quiet. Not angry. Not cold. Quiet in the way that
Avery's POV I grabbed the mask from the floor. My hand was moving before the thought finished. I pressed it to my face, turned, and walked offstage. I did not run because running turned a malfunction into a catastrophe, and I was not ready for that. I walked at the pace of a woman handling a costume failure. I was not handling anything. The wings took me in. The stage lights dropped away behind me and the moment I crossed into the dark my legs went. I caught myself against the wall and pressed my back to the concrete and slid down until I was on the floor. Then the shaking. The kind that came when you had been holding something back for months and it finally stopped waiting. Not the kind I had hidden from Liam in the car. Not the kind I had held through the lift after Colton. The real kind. The unexpected kind that happened when a secret your life depended on had just been revealed. I pressed the mask harder against my chest and focused on breathing. In. Out. The way you
Avery's POVI got into my car without looking back at the pharmacy door.My hand was not steady on the key at all and I tried several times before I got it turned on. I turned the engine over on the second try and pulled out before I had even checked my mirror. I took the back road out of the carpa
Avery's POVI looked at the message on my phone for a long time before I did anything with it.'Are you home? I have been trying to reach you all afternoon.'He had sent it forty minutes ago, and my phone had been on silent in my pocket since the lecture hall that morning, which meant there were pr
Avery's POV Dean came to within about ten seconds. He made a sound first. A low, rough sound that was not quite a word. Then he shifted on the floor and one of his hands moved, and then he was coughing, and then he was swearing. "You fucking bitch." He was still on his side. He rolled slowly on
Avery's POVHe stopped in the kitchen doorway.Dean was not a man who did surprise well. He was not a man who did anything well, really, but surprise in particular was a genre his face had no training for. He looked at me and then at my mum and then at the purse on the table between us and then at







