INICIAR SESIÓNThe coconut chicken broth is perfect.She knows it is. She's made it three times now — adjusting the ratio of coconut water to stock, tweaking the timing on the herbs, getting the chicken to the exact texture that means it'll melt into porridge without going chalky. The house chef confirmed it this evening with a raised eyebrow and a nod that meant more coming from him than a full sentence would from anyone else.It's the best thing she's learned to make in twenty years of not knowing how to cook.She fills a bowl and puts it in the insulated carrier and walks down the hall toward the light under Liam's study door — the same light that's been on every night this week, burning past midnight, burning until she finally falls asleep and it doesn't matter anymore.She knocks.A pause. Then: "Come in."She pushes the door open.He's not at his desk.He's on the narrow balcony off the study — standing with his back t
Dr. Yao pulls down his mask."Ninth rib fracture. Not critical — but we're keeping him for observation to rule out complications. Pneumothorax, hemothorax." He looks at them both over the rims of his glasses. "Young, strong baseline. He'll recover. But he needs rest and he needs to stay."Liam exhales.It's not a sound — barely even a movement. Just a fractional release of something he's been holding since the moment that truss hit, and Allie watches it happen beside her and feels the relief move through her own body like something unlocking.Then the tears come.She doesn't mean them to. She is not, generally, a person who cries in hospital corridors over men who have made it very clear they don't particularly like her. But the image keeps replaying without her permission — the shadow falling, the fraction of a second where she understood what was coming and couldn't move — and Adam, Adam, running from the wing with no calculation, no hes
The performance is the best thing she's ever done.She knows it the way performers know — not from applause, not from the judges' faces, but from the specific quality of a room that has stopped thinking and started feeling. The auditorium is held breath and full hearts, and Allie is Juliet, and Adam is Romeo, and somewhere out there in those thousand dark seats there may or may not be a man with cold eyes and a phone call she cannot stop hearing.She doesn't look for him.She performs.The final act is the death scene.The stage transforms — low light, mournful strings, the particular chill of a love story that was never going to survive its own beauty. Allie stands at the edge of the elevated platform — one meter of height, softened by the cushion below hidden beneath a scatter of prop flowers — and she speaks the last lines of Juliet in a voice that doesn't feel borrowed anymore:"I seek not to l
She hangs up first.She doesn't want to — she wants to stay on the line until he says something that sounds like him, until the voice on the other end matches the man who came home early and pressed his lips to her hair and told her to sleep — but she can hear the distance in his silence, vast and deliberate, and holding on to it only makes the ache worse."Goodnight," she says.He's already gone.Allie sets her phone on the nightstand and lies back against the pillow and stares at the ceiling in the specific dark of a room where everything is wrong in a way she can't prove.He was in a meeting. She says it to herself like a rope she's trying to hold onto. People have meetings. People are short on the phone when they're working. It doesn't mean anything.But her chest knows the difference between busy and ice.And what she heard tonight was ice.She lies awake for a long
Liam stops walking.He's at the top of the stairs, heading toward the balcony, the house quiet around him — and he stops because the two figures he can see through the glass panels of the sunroom door are not what he expected, and the thing tightening in his chest right now is not something he has a clean name for.Allie is asleep.She's folded over the small marble table on the balcony, head resting on her crossed arms, script still splayed open beneath her cheek, completely, utterly unconscious in the way she sleeps when she's genuinely exhausted — deep and boneless and unguarded, her dark hair spilling across the table, her breathing slow.Adam is beside her.He hasn't moved. He's sitting with his own script in his hands, but he's not reading it. He's looking at her — and Liam has known this boy for twenty-one years, has watched him be cold and precise and deliberately removed from everything that might require him to feel some
---By day eight of the exposure sessions, Adam doesn't flinch.The cameras fire — six of them, from three angles — and he stands center stage with his shoulders level and his jaw set and his eyes open, and he keeps running his lines without losing a single word. The flash hits his face like a slap and he absorbs it the way a person absorbs cold water: fully, without pleasure, but without breaking.The team watches him the way people watch something they don't entirely believe is real.I watch him and feel something sharp and warm and complicated move through my chest that I have gotten very good at pushing back down."Good," I say. Even. Professional. "Again."He runs it again.And again.The cameras don't stop him anymore.Three days before the Showcase, the rehearsals follow us home.It starts practically — the blocking has specifics we keep second-guessing, dialogue rhythms that only work at full run-through spee
Something about Vivian was… off.
Did she say something wrong again?The moment the word left her lips, Allie caught it—the subtle twitch in Adam’s brow, the slight narrowing of his eyes.A flicker of irritation, barely there, but sharp enough to slice through her confidence.Adam folded his arms across his chest, his stance as clo
Liam looked stunned for a split second.I could see it—the slight hitch in his breath, the way his gaze lingered on me just a little too long. It was rare to catch him off guard, and I had done it with one kiss. A soft one. Barely there. But enough.My cheeks burned with the aftermath. I turned my
Liam’s eyebrows twitched slightly.That was twice today.I had kissed him—completely unprovoked. And now, I couldn’t even look him in the eye.God, what was wrong with me?My cheeks were burning, the heat spreading down my neck like a wildfire. Had I been too forward? Was I misreading him entirely?







