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The Accident

Penulis: Jubilee Moores
last update Tanggal publikasi: 2026-04-13 11:12:16

POV: Vivian Ashford

The event is a film industry reception in Hollywood Hills, the kind that gets scheduled on a Wednesday evening because Wednesday evenings feel less formal and the guest list is smaller and the conversations are supposed to be more genuine, and I have been here for two hours doing the work of being present and professionally engaged and I am done and I want to go home.

Marcus offered his driver. I said no, because the Marcus situation is one I am navigating with the specific
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  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   SATURDAY

    POV: Vivian AshfordI spend Saturday morning watching him.Not in person. On my laptop, in the Silver Lake apartment, with my coffee going cold beside me, pulling up every piece of footage I can find from the past ten months. Press interviews, red carpet moments, the Forbes interview, the clip from the board meeting hallway, the #SterlingBrothersWar footage from the office.I watch them in order.I watch them the way I watch footage of my own performances, which is analytically, the specific skill of someone who has been trained to read bodies and faces and the gap between what a person says and what a person means, and what I see when I apply that skill to Chase Sterling across ten months of public footage is something I have been too close to see before.He hurts after.Every single time.The Forbes interview, the pull quote moment, he is smooth and pleasant and the interviewer is charmed, and then there is a cut to him standing outside the building afterward and his face in the two

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   Vivian's Realization

    POV: Vivian AshfordI watch the hospital footage three times.Not the public footage, there is no public footage from inside the room, but the footage that exists in my memory, which I have been replaying since I got home last night with the specific quality of something you know you are going to be replaying for a long time.He said: I have loved you since the second semester of sophomore year.He said: I have not stopped for a single day since.He said: I don't know how to be this without hurting you.He said all of it with the flinch following each true thing, the physical cost of the spell making every honest sentence visible in his body, and I sat beside his bed and I held his hand and I watched it happen and I cried when he was asleep and I left before he woke up.And now I am on my couch in Silver Lake with my coffee and the ring on my finger and the footage playing in my head, and I am trying to figure out what to do with what I know.The problem is the following: he won't rem

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   Confessions

    POV: Vivian AshfordHelena calls me back within twenty minutes of Chase going quiet on the phone, which means she was monitoring, which means she knew this was going to happen and had contingencies in place, which is very Helena."He's all right," she says, before I can ask. "The spell's physical toll compounded with the curse's resistance. He needs medical attention and rest.""Hospital," I say."I've called an ambulance," she says. "Cedars has his records from the last visit.""I'm coming," I say.A pause. "Vivian. He won't remember what he said. When the spell ends, everything he said under it will feel like something that happened in a dream. He won't know he told you."I sit with that."I'm still coming," I say.He is in a room on the fourth floor when I arrive, pale and hooked to an IV with the monitors doing their work, and it is the second time I have sat beside a hospital bed of his making and both times feel nothing alike.The first time he was beside mine.This time the nur

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   Confessions

    POV: Vivian AshfordHelena calls me back within twenty minutes of Chase going quiet on the phone, which means she was monitoring, which means she knew this was going to happen and had contingencies in place, which is very Helena."He's all right," she says, before I can ask. "The spell's physical toll compounded with the curse's resistance. He needs medical attention and rest.""Hospital," I say."I've called an ambulance," she says. "Cedars has his records from the last visit.""I'm coming," I say.A pause. "Vivian. He won't remember what he said. When the spell ends, everything he said under it will feel like something that happened in a dream. He won't know he told you."I sit with that."I'm still coming," I say.He is in a room on the fourth floor when I arrive, pale and hooked to an IV with the monitors doing their work, and it is the second time I have sat beside a hospital bed of his making and both times feel nothing alike.The first time he was beside mine.This time the nur

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   The Truth Spell

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  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   Bachelorette Party Disaster

    POV: Vivian AshfordMarcus books the penthouse suite at the Aria for the whole weekend, which is the kind of gesture that sounds generous and functions as control, because a weekend in a suite Marcus paid for in a city Marcus chose for a party Marcus organized means that the entire event exists within Marcus's architecture, and I understood that when he offered and I said yes anyway because I did not have the energy to plan my own bachelorette party and someone offering to do it felt like relief.That was a month ago.Now I am standing on the balcony of the suite at eleven on a Friday night with a champagne glass and the Las Vegas skyline doing its excessive, beautiful thing below me, and inside there are twelve women I like to varying degrees and a DJ Marcus also hired, and the whole thing is very loud and very expensive and feels nothing like me.Sienna finds me on the balcony.She leans on the railing beside me and looks at the city and doesn't say anything, which is one of her bet

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   Paparazzi War

    POV: Chase SterlingThe strategy is simple and terrible and I implement it on a Tuesday afternoon with the specific efficiency of someone who has stopped examining whether the things they are doing are things they should be doing.My PR director, a man named Callum who has been managing Sterling In

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   Ethan's Investigation

    POV: Ethan BeckettThe piece I am writing is the longest thing I have attempted in three years of professional journalism, and I am writing it the way you write the things that matter, slowly and from multiple directions simultaneously, building toward a center that I am still not entirely sure I w

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   The Sterling Estate

    POV: Chase SterlingThe Sterling estate in Greenwich is forty-two acres of money made visible, which is what old wealth does when it has enough of it and enough time, it builds gardens and puts walls around them and calls it a home. The house itself is Georgian revival, eleven bedrooms, a ballroom

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   Helena Arrives

    POV: Helena MoreauThe jet lands at Teterboro at seven-fifteen on a Tuesday morning in November, which is not a dramatic hour for an arrival but which is the hour I chose because I have been planning this visit for three weeks and I wanted to arrive early enough to be in Manhattan before Chase's da

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