Chapter Seven: The Confession

I didn’t answer his last text, and he didn’t send another one, and somehow that silence sat heavier between us than any argument could have. It followed me into the next morning, into the coffee I didn’t drink, into the note I found myself rereading on my phone for the first time in days.

I’m sorry about the song. It wasn’t me. But I know who it was.

I’d been so buried in contracts and cameras since that night that I’d let it slide to the back of my mind, filed away with the shadow on the roof and the message on my glass door. But it was still there. Still unanswered. And the man who’d sent it was currently sitting across my kitchen table because Gerald had decided we needed to “run lines” before tomorrow’s appearance.

“You knew,” I said, setting my phone down between us like evidence. “The night the song leaked. You already knew who did it.”

Cole didn’t look up from the script pages he was flipping through. “Knew what.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t pretend you don’t remember sending this.” I turned the phone around so he could see the message glowing on the screen. “You said you knew who leaked it. You never told me who.”

He went very still, the kind of stillness I was starting to recognize as him deciding how much of the truth he could afford to give me.

“I wrote it,” he said finally.

“Wrote what.”

“The article. Years ago. About your old label, about what happened with your discovery deal going sideways.” His voice was flat, rehearsed almost, like he’d practiced saying this exact sentence in a mirror. “I’m the reason people started asking questions about you before you were ready to answer them.”

The kitchen went very quiet. I heard my own pulse before I heard anything else.

“You’re the reason I got dropped.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea what that year did to me? I couldn’t book a session. I couldn’t get a manager to return a call. I sat in my apartment for six months wondering if I’d imagined ever being good at this.”

“I know what the article did. I’ve known for five years.”

“Then why take this job? Why sit across from me in that coffee shop knowing exactly who I was and what you’d done to me?”

“Because I owed someone, and I thought I could do this without you ever finding out. That was arrogant of me. I see that now.”

“Arrogant.” I laughed, and it didn’t sound like a laugh at all. “You sat across from me in that coffee shop knowing that, and you said nothing.”

“I know.”

“You let me sign a contract with you. You let me stand next to you for photos. You held my hand on a stage in front of an audience chanting for us to kiss, and this whole time —”

“Rhea.”

“Don’t.” I stood up so fast the chair nearly went over behind me. “Get out.”

He didn’t move at first, and when he finally did, it wasn’t toward the door. He stood too, slower, and something in his face had cracked open in a way I hadn’t seen from him yet, something that looked less like guilt and more like exhaustion.

“I’m not asking for forgiveness,” he said. “I know I don’t get to ask for that. I’m asking for a chance to make it right, however long this contract runs.”

“Why would I give you that.”

“Because I don’t have anywhere else to put it.” He followed me toward the door anyway, close enough that I could hear how unsteady his voice had gotten underneath the calm he usually wore like a second skin. “I’ve been running from what I did for five years, Rhea. I’m tired. I don’t want to run from it anymore.”

“That’s not my problem to fix.”

“I know. I’m not asking you to fix it. I’m asking you to let me try.”

I stood there with my hand on the door, furious, and underneath the fury, something else, something that recognized the particular exhaustion in his voice because I’d heard it in my own more than once. I didn’t let go of the door. I didn’t open it either.

“Eight weeks,” I said. “That’s what the contract says. If you want to spend them trying to make up for something you can’t undo, that’s your business. But the second I think you’re lying to me about anything else, we’re done. No warnings, remember. That was the rule.”

“I remember.”

Something in the silence after that felt like it needed filling, and he was the one who filled it, quiet, like the words cost him more than the confession had.

“My mother used to say sorry doesn’t put anything back the way it was,” he said. “She was right about that. About most things, actually. She just wasn’t around long enough to say much else.”

It was the smallest thing, one sentence, gone as fast as he’d offered it, but it was the first true thing he’d told me that didn’t sound rehearsed, and I filed it away without meaning to, the same careful way he’d been filing away pieces of me since the day we met.

“You can stay for the run-through,” I said, quieter now. “That’s all I’m offering tonight.”

He nodded and sat back down, gathering the script pages that had scattered when I’d shot up from the table. His hands weren’t quite steady either, I noticed, small movements that gave away more than his voice ever did.

“Thank you,” he said. “For not opening that door.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Ask me again in eight weeks.”

We ran the lines twice through without either of us really landing them, both of us thinking about a confession that still didn’t sit right in my chest no matter how many times I turned it over. Something about the way he’d said I wrote it had come too fast, too smooth, like a line he’d rehearsed long before I ever asked the question, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever he’d handed me tonight, it wasn’t the whole truth. Just enough of one to survive the conversation.

When he finally left, close to midnight, he paused at the door the same way he had after the podcast, one hand on the frame, like there was more he wanted to say and no safe way to say it. This time I didn’t wait for him to find the words.

“Goodnight, Cole.”

“Goodnight, Rhea.”

He was gone before I could decide whether I believed a single thing he’d told me.