Chapter Twelve: The Photo

Neither of us slept. We sat up with the photo still glowing on my phone between us, passing theories back and forth that all led to the same uneasy place.

“She wasn’t just watching me that night,” I said slowly. “She was watching you too.”

Cole didn’t answer right away. He was staring at the photo again, at his own younger face, at Evelyn’s hand resting on his shoulder like she owned something in that frame that wasn’t hers.

“I never thought about it that way,” he said. “I thought I was the one keeping tabs on her. Following the story. I never considered that she might have been keeping tabs on me the whole time too.”

“Two obsessions instead of one.”

“That’s a horrifying way to put it, but I don’t have a better one.” He rubbed a hand over his eyes, exhaustion catching up with him all at once. “I’ve spent five years thinking I was the one who got away clean, aside from the article. Turns out I might have just been someone she hadn’t gotten around to using yet.”

“That’s not much better.”

“No. It’s not.”

I set the phone face-down on the dresser, like that might stop the image from replaying in my head. “She’s not just trying to keep me small. She’s trying to keep both of us small. Together, apart, it doesn’t matter, as long as she’s the one deciding the shape of it.”

“That tracks with everything I know about her.”

“Then we need help figuring out what she actually has, not just what she’s willing to show us.” I was already reaching for my own phone, scrolling to a name I trusted more than almost anyone else in this business. “I’m calling Lena.”

“At two in the morning?”

“Lena doesn’t sleep either. It’s one of the reasons I like her.”

“What can she actually do that we can’t.”

“Dig. She’s better connected than either of us, and she doesn’t have a career riding on staying quiet about what she finds.” I was already dialing before I finished the sentence. “If anyone can find out what Evelyn’s actually holding, it’s her.”

Lena picked up on the second ring, voice rough with sleep but alert fast once I explained, fast the way people get when they’ve spent years being the person other people call in an emergency. She didn’t ask why I was awake, or why Cole’s voice was audible in the background. She just asked what I needed.

“I need to know what Evelyn Cross actually has on us,” I said. “Not rumors. Proof. Something we can use instead of just something we’re scared of.”

“Evelyn Cross. As in Gerald’s Evelyn.”

“You know her?”

“I know of her. Everybody who’s been in this industry long enough knows of her. She doesn’t show up much, but when she does, careers tend to change direction fast.” A pause, the sound of Lena moving around her apartment, waking up properly now. “This explains a lot, actually. Some things I’ve heard over the years that never quite added up.”

“I’ll make some calls,” Lena said. “Give me a day.”

“Lena.”

“A day, Rhea. I’m good, not magic. If she’s been hiding what she’s hiding for this long, it’s not going to fall into my lap overnight.”

I hung up feeling steadier than I had in hours, some of the panic settling into something closer to purpose. Cole was still sitting across from me, quiet in a way that felt different from his usual guardedness, like something in tonight had loosened a door he normally kept shut.

“What,” I said.

“Nothing.”

“That’s never nothing with you.”

“I keep thinking about that showcase,” he said. “Not Evelyn being there. Just you, up on that stage, seventeen and terrified, singing like the building would fall down if you stopped.”

“You remember that specifically?”

“I remember the piece I never filed about it.” He looked down at his hands, then back up, careful with the words. “I was twenty three, freelancing, technically there covering someone else’s set. I watched you instead and wrote three different drafts about what I’d seen. Never sent any of them in.”

“Why not?”

“Because you weren’t a story yet. You were just good, better than anyone else I’d seen that year, and it felt wrong to turn that into content before you’d even had the chance to become whatever you were going to become.” He shrugged, self-conscious, like he’d said more than he meant to. “I didn’t know Evelyn was in that room. I only had eyes for the stage.”

I didn’t know what to do with that, standing there in a room that had held so much bad news over the last few hours it didn’t feel like there was room left for anything else. It wasn’t a confession of anything beyond respect, but it landed somewhere quiet in my chest anyway, proof that at least one person in that industry had looked at me back then and seen something worth protecting instead of something worth using.

“You should have led with that,” I said.

“Would’ve made for a strange first conversation in a coffee shop.”

“Fair point.”

We didn’t say much else that night. There wasn’t much left to say that wouldn’t have felt too large for the hour, or too fragile to survive daylight.

Lena called back the next afternoon, her voice tighter than it had been the night before.

“I got something,” she said. “You’re not going to like how I got it.”

“Lena.”

“I have her journal, Rhea. The actual thing. Handwritten, going back years.” A pause, heavy enough that I could hear my own heartbeat in it. “You need to see this in person. Not over the phone.”

“Just tell me it’s bad.”

“It’s worse than bad. Come to my place. Bring Cole. You’re both going to want to see this together, not separately, because I don’t think either of you is going to believe it alone.”

“Give me something. Anything. I can’t sit here for the next hour not knowing.”

“Fine. One word.” She hesitated, like even saying it out loud made it more real. “Awards.”

“What about awards.”

“There’s an entry in here about your awards ceremony. Coming up in two weeks. I don’t know what it means yet, but I know I don’t like it.” Her voice dropped lower. “Get here as soon as you can, Rhea.”