The drive home is silence with a pulse. Jared's knuckles are white on the steering wheel, his jaw set at an angle that could cut glass, and the only sound is the engine and the city scrolling past the windows like a film neither of us is watching.
I sit in the passenger seat with my bruised arm cradled against my ribs and my head leaned against the cold glass and don't say a word. There are too many words stacked up behind my teeth and none of them are safe.
He parks in the driveway. Kills the engine. Neither of us moves for three seconds that last a year — the dashboard clock ticking, the engine cooling with metallic clicks, the whole weight of the evening sitting in the car with us like a third passenger. Then he's out, around the car, up the steps.
I follow, my heels loud on the stone path, the night air cold against the skin the dress leaves bare. Inside, he locks the front door — deadbolt first, then the chain, the systematic double-check that's become routine since the knife — and turns toward the stairs.
Then stops.
On the floor, just inside the threshold, like it's been waiting patiently for us to come home — a white envelope. Someone slid it under the door while we were at the nightclub, while we were performing and fighting and standing in bathrooms with men who shouldn't be there.
Jared picks it up. Tears it open with one motion, pulls out the paper inside, and his face goes rigid. Not the defensive lock I'm used to, not the smirk-armor. Something deeper, something that reaches all the way down to the foundation.
"What is it?" I step closer. "Let me see."
He walks to the fireplace. Strikes a match — his hands steady, his movements deliberate, the motions of someone performing a ritual he's done before. He holds the flame to the paper's edge and feeds it to the fire. I watch the edges curl and blacken, the paper contracting as it burns, and just before it's consumed I catch two words assembled from cut-out newspaper letters, the kind you see in movies about people who are being hunted: TRUTH and SURFACE.
He drops the ash. Watches it settle. Turns to me.
"Go to bed, Mia."
His voice is hollow — carved out, emptied of everything that usually lives there. Not a command this time. A plea dressed up in a command's clothing. I stand in the living room watching the last ember die against the fireplace grate and think about Robert's watch catching the bathroom light, Ron's fingerprints on my wrist, and the look on Jared's face when the paper burned — the look of a man watching a countdown he can't stop.
"Who is Robert Kane?" The question leaves me before I've decided to ask it, sudden, sharp, pointed at his back as he heads toward the kitchen.
His eyes flicker but his face stays locked. "I told you. We went to the same academy."
"That's not what I'm asking and you know it." I follow him through the doorway. He opens a cabinet, pulls down a glass, fills it from the tap. His back is to me and his shoulders are a wall. "He followed me into a bathroom. Put his hands on me. Told me I'm not in your league. Asked how much you're paying me." I plant myself at the island between him and the exit. "That's not an old teammate catching up, Jared. That's someone who knows something."
He drinks the water. Sets the glass down. Doesn't turn around.
I push harder, laying each piece on the counter between us like playing cards face-up, watching the back of his head for cracks. "And the knife on the doorframe. The note smeared in paint. The letter tonight — 'the truth will surface.' What truth, Jared?"
My voice is climbing and I let it climb because I've earned the volume, I've bled for the volume, I pushed him out of the path of a speeding car and I'm standing in his kitchen with bruises on my arm from two different men and he owes me something. "Coach said he covered for you ten years ago. An accident. What accident? What are you hiding?"
He turns. His expression is stone — not the charming mask, not the smirk, not any version of Jared Morgan I've cataloged in the weeks I've lived in his house. Something older and harder underneath all of them, something that was there before the fame and the money and the contract, something that looks like it hasn't slept in a decade.
"Robert is a jealous, washed-up rival who can't stand that I'm going to the Super Bowl and he's watching from the couch." His voice is flat, recited, the quality of a speech he's given before. "The letters are fan trash. That's it."
I don't believe a word of it. He knows I don't — I can see the knowledge sitting behind his eyes like a person watching from a window. The silence stretches between us until it hums, filling the kitchen with a frequency that vibrates in my sternum.
Then he leans forward. Both hands flat on the counter, his body angling toward mine, and the energy in the room flips like a coin. "My turn."
My fingers tighten around the edge of the island.
"Who was the guy at the boutique?"
My stomach drops through the kitchen floor and keeps going, past the foundation, past the earth, into some bottomless place where all my secrets are waiting to catch it. "I told you. A fan—"
"The fan who grabbed your wrist hard enough to leave bruises." His eyes drop to my arm, the sleeve I pulled down in the nightclub bathroom, the evidence I've been hiding under fabric all week. "The one Luke had to position himself between you and at the facility last week." He straightens. "Who is he, Mia? Your lover? Because if you're screwing around behind the cameras and this cover gets blown—"
"He's not my lover." My voice cuts through his sentence like glass through silk — sharp, clean, leaving an edge that draws blood. The audacity of the word lover coming from a man who won't tell me why people are leaving knives in his wall.
"Then who?"
I hold his gaze across the kitchen island. My arm throbs under my sleeve. Ron's name sits on my tongue like a coal I can't spit out and can't swallow, because saying his name opens a door to William and the custody threat and the headline Ron invented and the entire web of extortion that would unravel everything we've built — the contract, the image, the fake fairy tale that's paying for my son's life.
Saying Ron means explaining why my ex-husband thinks William is Jared's son, and that means explaining the party, and the timeline, and the night my father died, and I'm not opening that door tonight. Not for Jared. Not for anyone.
I say nothing. He says nothing. The kitchen holds us like a cage — two people buried to their necks in secrets, each daring the other to dig first, each terrified of what the shovel might hit. His hands are still flat on the counter. Mine are still white-knuckled on the island's edge.
The fluorescent light buzzes above us and somewhere in this house there's a fireplace full of ash that used to be a threat, and in my pocket there's a phone full of messages from a man who wants to burn us both, and between us on the counter there's a glass of water and nothing else. No truth. No trust. Just the hum of everything we refuse to say, pressing against the walls of a house that's running out of room to hold it all.