บททั้งหมดของ Crossing the line : บทที่ 71 - บทที่ 76

Ethan’s POVTyler wasn’t supposed to be home.I realized that the second I pushed open the door to the condo and found him sitting on the couch, elbows on his knees, staring at something on his phone with the kind of stillness that meant trouble.He didn’t look up when I stepped in. “You saw it?”My pulse kicked. “Saw what?”He finally lifted his eyes. Not angry. Not shocked. Worse—calm. Like the quiet before a building collapses.“Ava’s draft.”My stomach dropped.“How—”“It was sent to me,” he said. “Anonymous inbox. Probably someone from the newsroom. Or someone who wants to watch you burn.”A cold rush slid down my spine. I set my keys on the counter, careful, like sudden movements might set him off.“What exactly did you see?”Tyler held up his phone—screen glowing with paragraphs I recognized far too easily. That raw confession. That one line that had branded itself in my mind:Truth isn’t always clean. Sometimes it stains, and you wear it anyway.My chest tightened. “You read t

Ava’s POV The morning after Ethan’s game, the city sounded different — thinner somehow, stretched tight like a wire pulled too far. My phone hadn’t stopped vibrating since dawn, not with messages or calls, but with notifications from strangers, trending hashtags, clipped game footage looping on timelines like a wound on repeat. Ethan Cole Losing His Calm —Is Pressure Cracking Him? The Scandal Season Continues. No one was calling it what it really was: a man unraveling under the weight the world kept dropping on him. I shut off the screen and exhaled. My apartment was quiet, too quiet. The kind of quiet that didn’t soothe — it scraped. A reminder of how everything in my life had been ripped open and rearranged in the span of weeks. The Chronicle badge no longer hung on the hook by my door. My inbox was nearly empty. My notebook, once overflowing with interviews and deadlines, now held a list of shifts from my new administrative job at a literacy nonprofit. It was good work. Hone

Ethan’s POV I didn’t sleep. Not for more than a few minutes at a time. Every time I drifted off, something jerked me awake—noise from the street, the hum of my phone, my own pulse kicking too hard. By sunrise, I was up, showered, and pacing the length of my living room like an animal in a cage. Ava’s text from last night was still burned into my screen: Yeah. Tomorrow. No emojis. No softness. No breath between the words. Just a yes that didn’t feel like a yes at all. Something was wrong. Not “bad day” wrong. Not “work stress” wrong. Something deeper, sharper, the kind of wrong that gets under your skin and doesn’t let go. I felt it before I saw her. Felt it again watching that damned op-ed blow up online—everyone arguing about ethics and silence and scandals like they were entertainment. And somehow… Somehow her name kept circling the edges without ever being said out loud. I didn’t know why. I just knew she was in the middle of it. And I hated that she didn’t call me.