CHAPTER 7: PUBLIC REVEAL

The story broke before Reyes even had a statement drafted.

Temi found out the way most of the city did, mid morning, mid coffee, phone buzzing itself off the edge of her desk while she was three hours deep into revising a facade elevation for the Whitmore contract. She'd almost missed the first buzz entirely, absorbed in a stubborn measurement that refused to line up on the drafting software, and only glanced down when the phone buzzed a second time, then a third, insistent in a way that finally pulled her attention away from the screen. Pri's voice came through before Temi had even finished unlocking the screen.

"Please tell me you have context for what I'm currently looking at."

"What are you looking at?"

"Page Six. Billionaire's Bridesmaid Bride. There's a photo of you leaving Voss Tower yesterday holding a folder against your chest like it's a baby. The caption calls you, and I'm quoting directly, the convenient replacement."

Temi's stomach dropped through the floor of her studio. She pulled up the article on her laptop, Pri still talking in her ear, and there it was, a grainy long lens photograph of her walking out onto Sixth Avenue the day before, sunlight hitting her face, the contract folder clutched to her chest exactly the way Pri described. Beneath it, a headline written to draw blood. Voss Heir Trades Runaway Bride for Her Best Friend, barely 24 hours later.

"How did they get this so fast," Temi said, mostly to herself.

"Someone leaked it. Has to be. Either someone in that building or someone close to the family, because this photo isn't paparazzi luck, this is someone who knew exactly where to stand and when."

Temi thought immediately of Marcus Voss, of the cold, assessing way he'd looked at her in that conference room, of his parting line about watching this arrangement closely. She hadn't told Adrian yet about the strange, prickling feeling she'd had walking past his father's briefcase on the way out, the sense that something about that visit had been staged rather than spontaneous. She filed it away to mention later and forced herself to keep reading.

The article was worse than the headline suggested. It rehashed Camille's very public exit from the rehearsal in loving detail, quoted an unnamed source close to the family calling the new arrangement, quote, sudden and strange, unquote, and included a second photo, older, pulled from some charity gala archive, of Temi standing slightly out of focus behind Camille and Adrian, captioned simply, the bridesmaid, then.

Her phone buzzed again. A text this time, from Adrian.

*I'm sorry you're seeing this before we could control the narrative. Reyes is drafting our statement now. Can you come to the office.*

Temi looked at Pri through the video call, both of them silent for a beat, the studio around her suddenly feeling smaller than it had ten minutes ago, the drafting table and the half finished elevation drawing looking like relics of a morning that no longer existed.

"Go," Pri said finally. "I've got the Whitmore drawings covered. Go deal with your billionaire crisis."

The Voss Tower lobby felt different this time, or maybe Temi was different walking into it, aware now of exactly how many eyes in this city were suddenly interested in her name. Even the security guard's polite nod felt loaded somehow, like he too had seen the headline over his morning coffee and was recalibrating who exactly he was waving through. She recognized the security guard who waved her through, recognized the elevator bank, recognized Naomi Chen waiting for her on the fortieth floor with an expression that had gone from cautiously professional to something closer to grim.

"They're camped outside the residential entrance to the penthouse," Naomi said without preamble, walking fast down the hallway, Temi struggling slightly to keep pace in her flats. "Three photographers as of an hour ago, more expected by tonight. We need to get ahead of this before it turns into a full circus."

Adrian was in the same conference room as before, tie gone entirely now, sleeves rolled to his forearms, looking like a man who hadn't slept. Reyes sat across from him with a laptop open, reading through draft language, and looked up when Temi walked in.

"Ms. Callahan. Good. We need your input on the statement before we release anything."

"Show me."

Reyes turned the laptop toward her. The draft was careful, clinical, three short paragraphs confirming the engagement, framing it as a whirlwind but genuine connection that had developed over the past year through Temi's friendship with Camille, deliberately vague about exact timelines, deliberately silent on any mention of a will or a deadline.

"This makes it sound like we were secretly falling for each other the whole time Camille and I were friends," Temi said. "That's not just a stretch, it's insulting to her."

"It's the version that survives scrutiny," Reyes said. "The alternative is the truth, which is considerably harder to spin favorably."

"The alternative is closer to what actually happened, which matters to me." Temi looked at Adrian. "I'm not comfortable lying about Camille. She's going through enough without us painting her as someone we betrayed for months behind her back."

Adrian rubbed a hand over his jaw, visibly weighing the two versions of the coming week, one where the press wrote a cleaner story and one where the truth held less potential for later exposure and betrayal in his own family's eyes. "What would you want it to say instead."

"The truth, mostly. That Camille and I are still friends. That circumstances changed quickly and unexpectedly, and that we're choosing to move forward honestly rather than pretend otherwise. People respect honesty more than they respect a manufactured fairy tale, especially once it inevitably unravels."

"If it unravels," Reyes said carefully, "the fallout is significantly worse if the original story was a fabrication."

"Exactly," Temi said. "So let's not fabricate one."

Adrian was quiet for a long moment, studying her the way he had in that dim bar two nights ago, like he was recalculating something. Whatever calculation he was running, it seemed to land somewhere unexpected, because when he finally spoke again his voice had lost some of the careful, practiced edge it usually carried in front of his own lawyer.

"Rewrite it," he said finally to Reyes. "Her way."

Reyes looked like he wanted to argue, glanced at Naomi for support, and got only a small, unreadable shrug in return. "Understood. Give me twenty minutes."

While Reyes worked, Adrian walked to the window, and Temi followed without entirely deciding to, standing beside him looking out over the park the way she had the day before, except everything about the view felt different now, weighted with the knowledge that somewhere below, cameras were waiting for either of them to step outside.

"I need to tell you something," Temi said quietly. "It might be nothing. But your father's briefcase. Yesterday, when he left, it sat against the doorframe for a while before he picked it back up. I didn't think anything of it at the time. I do now."

Adrian went very still beside her. "You think he recorded the meeting."

"I don't know. I just think it's strange that this leaked so fast, with details specific enough to sound like someone who was actually in that room, not someone guessing from the outside."

Adrian's jaw tightened, the same tell she was starting to recognize as his version of real anger, controlled enough to look like nothing to anyone who didn't know to watch for it. "If he recorded that room, Ms. Callahan, then he has every negotiated term of our contract on tape, including clauses neither of us has made public yet."

"Which means he already knows exactly how to weaponize it against us whenever it benefits him most."

Before Adrian could answer, Naomi appeared in the doorway, her face pale in a way Temi hadn't seen from her yet, phone held out in front of her like it had personally wronged her.

"There's a second story," Naomi said. "Just went up five minutes ago. Different outlet. It's not about the engagement."

"What is it about," Adrian asked.

Naomi turned the phone screen toward them both, and Temi felt the floor tilt beneath her a second time in one morning, because the headline staring back at her had nothing to do with a rushed romance or a runaway bride at all.

Voss Family Will Under Scrutiny: Sources Allege Irregularities in Elias Voss's Final Testament.

For a moment nobody in the room said anything at all. Reyes had gone still over his laptop, fingers hovering above the keys like he'd forgotten what he was typing. Adrian read the headline twice, his expression sliding from anger into something colder and more focused, the look of a man realizing the ground beneath his entire plan had just shifted without warning.

"Get Elias's estate lawyer on the phone," Adrian said quietly. "Now."

Temi stood between them, the contract statement still glowing unfinished on Reyes's laptop screen, and understood, with a cold and sudden clarity, that whatever story the two of them had agreed to tell the world about their marriage was about to become the least complicated thing either of them would have to deal with today.