LOGINThe coffee in front of me went cold while he talked.Grant kept his voice low, steady, almost clinical. Someone from the old production side had resurfaced. Not Bella. Someone who still held the original unedited files from that night and had been waiting for the right moment. They knew my full name now, my firm, even the floor I worked on. The message they sent him had been short and clear: pay or the files go to people who can hurt both of us.I listened without interrupting. My hands stayed folded on the table so he wouldn’t see them tighten.When he finished I looked at him for a long moment.“You could have handled this alone,” I said. “You’ve always been good at that.”“I tried.” His eyes didn’t leave mine. “They already knew how to reach you. Telling you was the only clean option left.”The café had grown quieter. Most of the evening crowd had thinned out. The light above our table cast a soft shadow across the side of his face. Three years had sharpened everything about him —
I stopped walking.Grant stood across the street beside a black car, hands in his pockets, watching me like he had been waiting. Three years had changed him. His face was sharper, his posture more settled, the kind of quiet confidence that came from building something without asking permission. The last time I saw him he had been the boy who told me to disappear. Now he looked like a man who no longer needed anyone’s approval.I should have kept walking.Instead I stayed still as he crossed the street toward me. The evening traffic moved around us. Neither of us spoke until he stopped a few feet away.“Zy.”My name in his mouth still landed heavier than it should have.“What are you doing here?” I asked.“I need to talk to you.”“We have nothing to talk about.”He looked at me properly then, eyes steady. “We do.”I adjusted the strap of my laptop bag and forced my voice to stay even. “I have a life now. A clean one. I’m not interested in going back to any of that.”“I’m not here to dr
Zy's POVI stared at the message, heart still racing.I’m outside. We need to talk. Now.For a second my mind went to every worst possibility. Then I forced myself up, pulled on a hoodie, and walked quietly to the front door. Uncle Juan was already asleep. I unlocked it carefully and stepped out onto the porch.Ivy stood by the gate with a plastic bag in one hand and a wide grin on her face.I blinked. “Are you serious?”She lifted the bag. “I brought real champagne, not the cheap stuff. Move, it’s heavy.”Relief hit me so hard I almost laughed. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”“That’s what you get for ignoring my first two texts.” She climbed the steps, pushed the bottle into my hands, and pulled me into a tight hug. “We won, Zy. We actually won.”I hugged her back, the tension finally leaving my shoulders. “You’re crazy for driving out here this late.”“I couldn’t celebrate alone. Come on.”We sat on the porch steps like we used to in the old days. Ivy twisted the bottle open wi
Zy's POVThe second drop hit harder than the first one.By afternoon it had moved beyond campus group chats. A local blog posted the pattern Ivy found. Then two more pages shared it. Dates. Names blacked out. Board involvement. Side-by-side cases of students who had complained and then gone quiet after Bella’s mother stepped in. The captions were getting sharper.“How many times has this happened?” “Board seat or protection racket?” “This didn’t start with one girl.”I sat in Uncle Juan’s living room with my phone in my hand, watching the shares climb. For once the tight feeling in my chest wasn’t fear. It was something closer to exhausted relief.Ivy called a little after four.“She’s finished,” she said as soon as I picked up.I stood and walked out to the porch. “What happened?”“Her mother got called in. Not a polite meeting. The serious kind. Admin, two board observers, the whole thing. They’re angry. Not at the school — at Bella. She dragged their name into a very public mes
Zy's POVIvy called me the next morning while I was still sitting at Uncle Juan’s kitchen table with a cup of tea I hadn’t touched. The house was quiet in that soft way I was still getting used to. Birds outside. The low sound of the refrigerator. No campus noise, no group chat explosions.“I found something bigger than the video,” she said without saying hello.I stood up and walked out to the small porch so my uncle wouldn’t hear. “Talk.”“Bella’s parents didn’t just protect her in your case. They’ve been doing this for a while. I got hold of three other complaints that disappeared after her mother stepped in. One girl almost lost her housing. Another one got her scholarship review delayed until she dropped the issue. There’s a pattern.”My fingers tightened around the phone. “Can you prove it?”“Enough to make noise. Not clean enough for court, but clean enough for campus pages and local blogs to start asking real questions. If we drop this together with the bruise evidence, it sto
Zy's POVUncle Juan’s house sat at the end of a quiet street lined with old trees. The kind of place where the loudest sound at night was the ceiling fan and distant dogs. When Molly dropped me off, he came out in a simple shirt and slippers, pulled me into a short, firm hug, then took both bags from my hands without asking questions.“You’re safe here,” was all he said.The room he gave me was small and clean. White walls, a single bed, a wooden desk under the window, and a faint smell of soap and old books. I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time after he left me alone, listening to the unfamiliar quiet. No campus noise. No group chat explosions. No one waiting around the corner to watch me fall.That first evening we ate in silence. Rice, grilled fish, and sliced mango. Uncle Juan didn’t push me to talk. He just refilled my plate once and said, “Eat. You look like you haven’t been sleeping.”I almost cried from how simple it felt.The next three days passed in the same soft rh







