MasukShe 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
The smell hits me before I even reach the kitchen.Rich, slow-cooked broth, the kind that takes hours and patience and a person who actually knows what they're doing — which, it turns out, Liam Hart does. He's standing at the stove in a white henley with his sleeves pushed up, and I stop in the kitchen doorway and just watch him for a second, because there is something deeply disorienting about the most controlled man I've ever met reducing a wild chicken to something that smells like the best thing I've ever stood near."You made broth," I say."You said you were starving." He doesn't look up from the pot. "Noodles are almost ready."My stomach makes a sound that is not dignified.He glances back. The corner of his mouth moves."Go get Adam," he says. "Tell him there's enough."I hesitate — remember the closed door, the one syllable, the click of the latch — and then I go anyway, because Liam made three portions and
I start to stand.His hand shoots out and catches mine.He doesn't look up. Doesn't lift his head from his knees. Doesn't say a word. He just — grabs my hand with both of his and holds on, the way a person holds on when they're out at sea and have found the only thing left that's solid.I stop moving.I sit back down."I'm not going anywhere," I say softly. "I'm right here."The auditorium breathes around us — dim and gray, the ghost light throwing its pale circle over the empty stage — and Adam Hart, who has kept every wall up and every door locked since the day I met him, sits curled on the floor of Aldridge Auditorium holding my hand like it's the only thing keeping him inside his own body.So I stay.I don't talk. Don't fill the silence with reassurances that would ring false, don't perform comfort at him the way people do when they're scared of the quiet. I just stay — shoulder close to his, hand in
Liam's voice, when he talks about that day, drops to somewhere barely above silence."He was a different kid before it happened." He doesn't look at me. He looks at his hands, at the space between us, at something I can't see. "Loud. Ridiculously curious about everything. He used to chase the dogs around this yard laughing so hard he'd fall over." A pause. Long. Heavy. "I took him to the amusement park. I was thirteen. I thought I was old enough to be responsible for a six-year-old for one afternoon." His jaw tightens. "I wasn't."I don't say anything.I don't try to fix it, because you can't fix twenty years of a guilt that has calcified into something structural — something a person builds their sense of obligation around, quietly, without naming it. I just sit close and hold his hand and let the silence be what it is.After a while, he exhales.I lean my head against his shoulder."He came back," I say softly. "He's here. That matte
The conference room buzzed with restless energy, cameras flashing as reporters murmured among themselves. Everyone was waiting for the moment to pounce.Allie Brooks arrived fashionably late, stepping through the doors with a calm that masked the storm within. Every pair of eyes turned to her, jud
Allie sighed: “We are really married, but we will be divorced soon.”Scarlett’s eyes widened in disbelief. "How can this be?" she asked, her voice laced with shock.Allie turned onto her side, staring at the ceiling. "The truth is simple. He doesn’t love me. I was just a distraction. A temporary fi
Vivian Brooks was ecstatic.Someone like Liam Hart—powerful, untouchable—could only be toying with Allison Brooks. That much was obvious.Now that everything was out in the open, Allison had become nothing more than a liability. He would discard her without a second thought, and Vivian couldn’t wai
Allie’s hands curled into fists as she glared at Liam.“I don’t care anymore, Liam. Julian is better than you, and at least he doesn’t treat me like I’m disposable. I won’t waste my breath arguing. If you don’t sign the divorce papers, I’ll take this to court. Let’s see if you can keep your secrets







