FAZER LOGINDr. 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
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
Cher Waverly shifted her weight, leaning slightly against the railing of the basketball bleachers, her lips curling into a bitter smile as her gaze turned distant. “Do you remember, Allie? After middle school graduation, Nick threw that big party. You invited me. I told you I didn’t own anything fa
"Allie," Nick's voice was low, almost pleading, as he stepped closer to her under the late afternoon sun. His figure, lean but tense, seemed a shadow of its former self. The confident, commanding man she once knew was now filled with raw vulnerability.“Allie,” he repeated, his voice cracking. “I’v
Allie followed Liam out of the airport, her steps mirroring his but her heart lagging far behind.She had expected...something—relief, joy, a spark of connection. Instead, Liam’s demeanor was calm, almost indifferent. It was like he had anticipated her presence, and not even her sudden return seeme
Allie Brooks sat at her usual corner table in the bustling cafeteria with Chloe West. They were halfway through their trays when trouble walked in wearing designer heels and a sharp smile.“Look who it is,” Felicity Montgomery’s voice rang out as she approached, her entourage flanking her like vult







