I wake up on the wrong side of a four-hundred-dollar pillow wall with a crick in my neck and the disorienting realization that I slept. Actually slept.
Full eight hours, maybe more, the deepest I've managed since William's diagnosis.
Jared's side is already empty, sheets pulled tight like a hotel bed, no evidence he was ever there. I sit up and listen to the shower running.
A few moments later, I pulled on yesterday's jeans with a t-shirt and padded downstairs, escaping the bedroom before he could emerge half-naked from the bathroom.
The morning light coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows is so golden it looks staged. The terrace doors are glass, and through them the yard glows. Wet grass, birds doing whatever birds do in neighborhoods where the property tax exceeds my annual income.
I want five minutes of quiet. Five minutes of sunlight on my face before the performance starts again. When I push the door open and step out, my brain stops processing in the correct order.
The knife is first. Buried in the wall beside the doorframe, handle out, blade sunk deep into the wood like someone drove it with their fist.
Pinned beneath it a white page, smeared in something thick and red that's run down the wall in streaks.
My fingers reach out before my brain catches up and I touch it, feeling how wet and cool it is. Paint, not blood — but my heart doesn't get the memo and my pulse detonates in my ears as my knees do something unreliable beneath me.
"What does it…"
Jared's hand suddenly reaches past my shoulder and rips the paper free.
I didn't hear him come up behind me. He's close enough that I feel his chest expand against my back when he reads it, close enough that I feel the exact moment his breathing changes.
His jaw turns to concrete as eyes sweep the yard — systematic, fast, the scan of a man who's done this before.
"What does it say?"
He folds the paper in half and slips it into his pocket like a receipt. "None of your business. Go inside."
His voice is flat in a way I haven't heard from him. Not cruel, not performing, not the lazy arrogance he wears like a second skin. Something underneath all of that, something stripped bare.
"Someone stuck a knife in your wall, Jared. That's literally my business, I live here too now."
"You live here temporarily. Go inside. Now." He pulls the knife from the wood and steps past me, shutting the terrace door.
Lock it, check the bolt twice with fingers that aren't quite steady, and then I follow him to the kitchen because I have never once in my life been told to go somewhere and actually gone there.
He pours coffee while I stand on the other side of the island with my arms crossed. "Who sent it?"
"Nobody."
"A knife pinned a note to your door and ‘nobody’ sent it. Did it arrive by carrier pigeon? Did the wall grow it?"
"Drop it, Mia."
"Tell me what it said."
"I said drop it."
"And I said tell me what—" The doorbell rings and we both freeze mid-sentence.
Jared's head turns toward the hallway while my hand is still raised, finger pointed at his arrogant face. The posture of a woman who was three seconds from winning a fight she now has to shelve.
He sets down his coffee as I set down my ammunition, and we both rearrange our faces in the two seconds it takes him to cross the hallway. By the time the door opens we are a couple who have never once disagreed about anything.
Least of all a knife in the wall at nine in the morning.
The PR woman walks in like the house isn't vibrating at a frequency that could shatter crystal. She's mid-thirties, blonde, clipboard in one hand and a tablet in the other, wearing a smile that was clearly A/B tested on a focus group.
"Good morning! I'm Claire, Mitchell & Associates. You must be Mia — you're even prettier in person!" She shakes my hand with the grip of someone who could sell sand to a beach and turns to Jared. "Looking good, champ. Ready to make America fall in love with you?"
"Thrilled," Jared says, in a voice that suggests the opposite of thrilled.
Claire sits us at the kitchen table and opens the tablet like a general unrolling a battle map. Public appearances — scheduled, color-coded, cross-referenced with media cycles. Charity events, press opportunities, social media rollout.
She slides a folder across the table and I open it to find photo schedules, scripted talking points, and a list of locations where paparazzi will "accidentally" discover us being in love.
"Poolside kiss, Tuesday two p.m.," I read aloud. "Intimate whisper — hold three seconds for a telephoto lens." I look up. "You're joking."
"I never joke about telephoto lenses." Claire's smile doesn't waver as she leans forward, hands folded. "Now — the foundation. Every couple needs an origin story, something the public can invest in emotionally. What do we build the narrative on? How did you two meet?"
Jared opens his mouth, but I get there first. "Actually, we know each other from high school."
The silence is surgical and across the table, Jared's coffee cup stops halfway to his mouth. Claire's eyes ignited like someone plugged Christmas lights into her skull.
"You're kidding." She's already typing. "The reunited Cinderella and Prince Charming — childhood sweethearts torn apart by life, brought back together by fate. The girl next door and the golden boy, separated for a decade… Fans will eat this alive!"
"That's not exactly how…" Jared starts.
"It's perfect," Claire repeats, fingers flying across the tablet. "We lead with this. Every interview, every photo op. This is the backbone."
Across the table, Jared is looking at me with an expression that could curdle milk at forty paces. His jaw is locked so tight I can see the muscle jumping beneath his ear, and his eyes are saying, very clearly, in a language that doesn't require translation.
You should not have said that.
I sip my coffee and hold his gaze.
He wanted convincing. So I'm convincing.
Claire clicks her tablet shut and her smile sharpens into something with a countdown attached.
"Now. Timeline. Tonight is the Divisional Round — your team needs to win to advance to the Conference Championship. Viewership projections are massive." She folds her hands. "The proposal happens tonight. On the field, after the game. Live on national television!"
The coffee hits the back of my throat wrong and I choke so hard my eyes water. "Tonight?"
"Strike while the iron's hot." Claire reaches behind her chair and produces a garment bag like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat she's been hiding all morning.
When she unzips it, inside I found the red dress. Heels to match — thin, sharp, the kind designed by someone who has never walked on grass.
"You're proposing to me," I say to Jared. "On a football field. In front of millions of people. Tonight."
He looks at the dress, then at me and shrugs with the resigned energy of a man who has accepted that his life is no longer his own. "Showtime."
Claire is already on her phone, coordinating something that involves the words "jumbotron" and "confetti budget" while I stare at the red silk spilling out of the garment bag.
The knife, the note, the paint on the wall — all of it dissolves under the weight of a much more immediate terror.
Tonight I'm going to stand on a field in front of sixty thousand screaming strangers and pretend to be proposed to by a man who threw my belongings in the trash twelve hours ago.
And the whole country is going to watch me say ‘yes.’
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