All Chapters of Falling for My Best Friend's Brother: Chapter 321 - Chapter 330

Avery's POV I grabbed the mask from the floor. My hand was moving before the thought finished. I pressed it to my face, turned, and walked offstage. I did not run because running turned a malfunction into a catastrophe, and I was not ready for that. I walked at the pace of a woman handling a costume failure. I was not handling anything. The wings took me in. The stage lights dropped away behind me and the moment I crossed into the dark my legs went. I caught myself against the wall and pressed my back to the concrete and slid down until I was on the floor. Then the shaking. The kind that came when you had been holding something back for months and it finally stopped waiting. Not the kind I had hidden from Liam in the car. Not the kind I had held through the lift after Colton. The real kind. The unexpected kind that happened when a secret your life depended on had just been revealed. I pressed the mask harder against my chest and focused on breathing. In. Out. The way you

Liam's POVI drove home.Not to her door. I drove to my own door and stayed in the car with the engine off and the street quiet around me, and then I went inside.I did not turn the lights on.I went to the kitchen, pulled a chair out at the table in the dark, put my hands flat on the surface, and stayed there.I did not know how long I stayed before my phone rang. Long enough for the house to go cold around me. Long enough for the street outside to go from the occasional car to nothing. Long enough for it to feel like something done rather than something still happening.Tate's name appeared on the screen.I answered."Talk to me," Tate said.I turned the phone over in my hand and looked at the dark wall and thought about where to start. There was no clean place because the whole thing ran together."It was her," I told him.Tate was quiet."The mask fell," I told him. "During he performance. It came off her face and the lights were on her and I was at the bar and I saw her face." I

Avery's POVI slept on the kitchen floor.Not intentionally. Lying there became sleep at some point and I woke up at six forty-three with my cheek on the cold tiles and my jacket still on. Everything in my body was making the case against kitchen floors.I got up.I made coffee.I stayed at the table with my phone. Nothing from Liam. Nothing from Jade. The notifications were from the campus forum and three group chats and a news alert about something I did not care about. I turned the screen over, put it face down, and drank my coffee.At eight seventeen my phone rang.Not a number I had saved. A Crestwood area code. I stared at it for two rings before I picked up."Avery." The manager's voice. He was the man who had run the Velvet Underground for the last nine years and who I had signed my first booking contract with almost nine months ago at a table in the back office with a pen that had run out of ink halfway through. "I am calling to check in. Last night was clearly difficult, loo

Liam's POVI went to training on Thursday.Not because I wanted to. Not because I had made sense of any of what had happened the night before. I went because we were in the middle of a tournament and I was a starting quarterback and not showing up without a reason was not something I did. The routine was the only thing that felt stable at this point and I needed that more than I needed to stay in bed and think.I ran the drills.I ran them well. My body knew what to do and it did it and my brain ran in a completely different direction the way it did when something was occupying it completely. Both things happened at once and somehow the drills were fine.Tate watched me from across the field.He did not say anything until the afternoon was almost up. By then I had been running on three hours of sleep and the cold quiet anger that I was carrying around since Wednesday night. It was not explosive. I had been angry that way before when Zoey cheated on me with a lecturer. But this was d

Avery's POV I also called my manager on Friday afternoon. Not at five PM which was my deadline. I had told myself I would use every hour the manager had given me. But by early afternoon I knew what I was going to say and waiting until the deadline was not going to make it any clearer. It was just bothering me for longer than I needed to. I dialled Tony's number and it rang twice. "Scarlett," he said. His voice was warm and professional. He had nine years of experience running a performing venue and I guess he was an expert on how to speak to people in difficult moments. "I have made a decision," I told him. "I am glad you called," he told me. "I am not coming back," I said to him. He was quiet. Not the silence of surprise. The silence of a man who had obviously had countless workers come and go over the years. "I hear you," he said. "Can I ask if this is because of what happened on Wednesday or whether this is something you had been thinking about before?" "Both," I told him.