5

The caption read: Sterling Vane's new "girlfriend" has a past he might want to G****e.

Ivy stared at the photo until the edges of it blurred. It was her, unmistakably, nineteen years old, standing outside a courthouse with her arm around her mother, both of them exhausted and hollow-eyed in a way that had nothing to do with celebration.

"Where did they get this."

"I don't know yet." Sterling's voice was tight, controlled in the way of a man holding something back by force. "Reagan's tracing it. It'll be pulled within the hour, but it's already been screenshotted a thousand times. That's how this works. Once it's seen, it's seen."

"You don't understand what this is a picture of."

"Then tell me." He said it quietly, not a demand, and something in the shift of his voice, the sudden absence of the performance he'd worn all night, made Ivy's throat go tight.

"My father." The words came out smaller than she meant them to. "That's the day he was sentenced. Fraud, embezzlement, something he did at the company he worked for that none of us knew about until they showed up at our door with a warrant. He left us with nothing and about two hundred thousand dollars of restitution the courts decided my mother was on the hook for too, because her name was on some of the accounts he used. That debt is half of why she's in that hospital bed right now, because she worked three jobs for a decade trying to pay it off and it broke her body doing it."

Sterling didn't say anything for a long moment. The car turned a corner, streetlights sliding gold across his face, and Ivy watched something in his expression rearrange itself entirely.

"That's not a story that makes you look bad," he said finally. "That's a story that makes you look like you survived something you didn't deserve."

"It doesn't matter what it actually says. It matters what people decide it says." Ivy's hands had curled into fists in her lap without her noticing. "By tomorrow I'll be a con artist's daughter who's clearly working the same angle on you. That's the headline they'll run, whether it's true or not."

"They won't run it." Sterling's jaw was set, hard. "I'll make sure of it."

"You can't control everything, Sterling."

"Watch me."

The car went quiet again, but it was a different quiet than before, and Ivy found herself watching him instead of the window, this man who twelve hours ago had been a stranger telling her to get off his floor, now sitting across from her with his hands clenched and something that looked almost like fury on her behalf written across his face.

"Why do you care?" she asked, before she could stop herself. "This is bad press. Isn't this exactly the kind of thing that should make you cut your losses and end this before it starts?"

Sterling looked at her for a long moment, long enough that the question felt like it had grown heavier in the silence.

"Because you didn't apologize to me in that lobby," he said finally, "and you're not apologizing to me now, for something that was never yours to be ashamed of. I've spent six weeks surrounded by people falling over themselves to tell me what I want to hear. You're the first person who's told me the truth without checking my face first to see how I'd take it."

"That doesn't answer the question."

"It's the only answer I have right now." His eyes held hers, dark and unguarded in a way she hadn't seen from him yet, not once, not in the office, not at the ceremony. "I don't know what to do with that yet either."

The car slowed outside her building, and for a moment neither of them moved to end it, the space between them charged with something neither the contract nor the six months nor either of their pride had accounted for.

Then Sterling's phone buzzed again, and whatever had been building between them cracked wide open into something else entirely.

He looked down at the screen, and Ivy watched every ounce of color leave his face.

"It's Reagan," he said slowly. "The photo wasn't leaked by a tabloid."

"Then who?"

Sterling turned the phone around one more time, and Ivy's stomach dropped straight through the floor of the car for the second time that night, because the message on the screen wasn't a headline or a gossip site.

It was a text, sent directly to Sterling's private number, from a contact saved simply as Dad.

Nice girl, Sterling. Does she know you're the reason her father went away?