Coach Harrison's office smells like leather and the kind of authority that doesn't need to raise its voice. He's behind his desk with his reading glasses on and a coffee mug that says WORLD'S BEST COACH in letters so faded the irony has become permanent.
Jared and I sit across from him like students called to the principal's office. Except the principal has a checkbook and the students are contractually obligated to kiss each other in public.
He slides a folder across the desk and I open it before my soul begins its slow departure from my body.
The PR calendar for the next two weeks, laid out in color-coded precision.
Café dates — timed to the minute, specific tables pre-selected for optimal sightline from the street. Boutique visits. A beach walk. A charity dinner with assigned seating and a suggested hand-holding duration.
"The paparazzi will be positioned at each location in advance," Coach says, leaning back in his chair like a man presenting a business plan he's particularly proud of. "All you two have to do is show up and perform. Claire's team handles the rest — angles, timing, which publications get first access."
Jared flips through his copy like a man reading his own sentencing. His thumb pauses on a page and I catch the heading: "Spontaneous Park Bench — Saturday, arrive 11:07am."
Spontaneous. Scheduled to the minute.
"The engagement story is gaining traction," Coach continues. "Cinderella narrative, high school sweethearts — the public is invested. We need to feed it. Consistently, convincingly, for the next fourteen days. After that, the Super Bowl does the rest." He looks at me. "Any questions?"
I have approximately four hundred questions. Starting with "how is my life real" and ending with "what happens when the telephoto lens catches me wanting to strangle my fake fiancé."
But I close the folder and press it against my chest like a shield. "Crystal clear."
Coach nods, dismissing us, and Jared is out the door before I've finished standing.
The corridor is bright and empty, our footsteps echoing off the polished floor, while I'm clutching the folder against my ribs. Trying to process a document that has scheduled the exact second I'm supposed to look lovingly at a man I'm not sure I even like, Jared's hand lands on the small of my back.
I almost flinch — not from the touch itself but from the fact that it appeared from nowhere, unprompted, in a hallway with no cameras and no audience.
Performing even when nobody's watching.
Or maybe he's not performing. That possibility is worse.
We round the corner and nearly walk straight into Luke. He's coming from the weight room, towel slung over his shoulder, hair damp at the temples. His eyes do a circuit — me, Jared, Jared's hand on my back — and his jaw tightens by one degree.
"Morning," Luke says.
"Morning." Jared nods, already steering me past him, already moving on. A man who categorizes people by relevance and has filed Luke somewhere below interesting.
Then my grip on the folder slips and the pages scatter across the corridor floor like a deck of cards. Photo schedules, scripted talking points, the color-coded calendar fanning across the tile in a mess of paper and catastrophe.
I immediately drop to my knees, grabbing at pages, and Luke crouches beside me automatically, reaching for the sheets closest to him.
His hand stops and I see what he's looking at a full second before I can move.
And that second lasts a year.
Coach Harrison's letterhead. Bold black type across the top of the page: PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AGREEMENT BETWEEN JARED MORGAN AND MIA SCOTT. The NDA clause in paragraph three. The payment schedule in paragraph seven.
One hundred thousand dollars on signing.
One hundred thousand after the Super Bowl.
Jared hasn't seen — he's already ten feet ahead, phone out, thumbs moving. Assuming I'm behind him because that's what he assumes about everyone.
Just me and Luke on the corridor floor. His eyes tracking across the page line by line, face changing in stages I can watch like weather rolling in.
Confusion first, the furrow between his brows. Then understanding, breaking across his features like water through a crack. Then something deeper — the look of a man absorbing a blow he didn't see coming and deciding where to put the pain.
He looks up at me. "It's fake…"
Not a question. A fact, confirmed by the document in his hands. My composure doesn't crack — it detonates. I reach for the paper and he holds it just out of range, not cruelly, his eyes still moving across the words like he needs to read them twice to believe them.
"The whole thing." His voice is low, barely audible. "The proposal. The party. The ring." His eyes find mine and they're steady but the steadiness is costing him something I can see in the tendons of his neck. "It's all fake."
I can't deny it. It's printed in black and white in his hands, stamped with a letterhead and a signature and the price of my son's life laid out in numbered paragraphs.
My vision blurs and throat closes around words I can't arrange fast enough.
"Luke, please…" My voice comes out fractured, ragged, nothing like the woman who stood at a microphone selling a love story to sixty thousand people. "Don't tell anyone. I signed this for William — you know the situation. You know what I was facing. I had no other choice. Please."
He stands there on the corridor floor holding my contract, and the hurt on his face is layered in ways I'll spend weeks unpacking. Hurt for me, hurt because I lied to him, and underneath both of those, something else entirely. Something that shifts behind his eyes like a door swinging open onto a room he thought was locked. Because if the engagement is a contract, if the ring is a prop, if I don't love Jared Morgan… then I'm not really his.
Luke gathers the scattered pages one by one. Straightens them against the floor with careful hands, aligning edges, smoothing creases. He stands and holds the stack out to me. Our fingers touch on the paper. He doesn't pull away.
"I won't tell anyone."
I exhale so hard my ribs ache.
"But you need to be careful, Mia." His voice is quiet, the kind of quiet that reaches further than shouting. "This thing — whatever it is — it's going to eat you alive."
Down the corridor Jared has stopped walking. He's turned back, phone lowered, watching us — two people standing too close, too still. A woman with wet eyes and a man holding her gaze like it's the only thing keeping him upright.
Jared's eyes narrow, and Luke sees him looking and holds the stare for one beat — challenging and not backing down.
Then Luke walks to the corridor door, stops with his hand on the frame, and turns back.
"You know where I am." His voice carries just far enough to reach me and not an inch further. "When it falls apart, and it will… You know where I am."
He pushes through the door and it swings shut behind him. I stand alone in the corridor pressing the folder against my chest like a wound I'm trying to hold closed, and I realize that Luke didn't just promise to keep my secret.
He promised to wait.