I wake to an empty bed. His side is cold — hours-ago cold, the sheets already forgetting the shape of him. His pillow still smells like his soap and I press my face into it for one pathetic second before I catch myself.
My phone has seventeen notifications. Claire's PR schedule for the day. Olivia wishing me luck. A photo from the nurses' station: William in a tiny foam football helmet someone fashioned from packaging material, grinning so wide his eyes disappear. I save it and look at it twice and the third time my vision blurs.
A text from Luke: Big day. Look after yourself. No mention of last night. No mention of the living room or the apology. Just steady, quiet Luke from whatever distance he's decided is right. I stare at it longer than I should.
I'm halfway into the dress Claire approved when my phone rings. Coach Harrison. His name on the screen sends a spike through me — Coach doesn't call me directly. The chain of command exists for a reason.
"Mia." His voice is wrong — tight, stripped of authority. "There's been an accident at the stadium. Practice field. A floodlight rig collapsed during warm-ups. Jared was underneath it."
The room goes white. Every surface bleached of color, the walls dissolving, my body standing in a bedroom that's stopped being real. I can only hear the word underneath repeating in a frequency that fills my skull.
I don't remember driving to the stadium. Don't remember parking or running through the corridor or shoving past the security guard. One second I'm holding my phone in his bedroom and the next I'm standing outside the medical station breathing so hard my ribs ache, both hands pressed flat against the wall.
Through the door I hear voices. Not doctors — something else. Robert Kane. Low, intimate, the cadence of a man holding a knife and enjoying the weight of it.
I freeze. Hand on the door handle.
"Six stitches and a dislocated shoulder. Could've been worse." A pause that drips with something oily. "Could've been your neck." Almost gentle. Almost caring — the tenderness of a man examining damage he understands intimately.
"When are you going to tell her all your dirty secrets, captain? Or should I do it for you?"
Silence so heavy I feel it through the door. Then Jared's voice, hoarse, stripped to the studs: "Get out."
Robert laughs softly. "Tick tock, Morgan. The truth has a way of finding daylight."
The door handle moves under my hand. I step back. Robert walks out — suit immaculate, like he's leaving a quarterly review. He sees me, reads my face — the tear tracks, the panic, the fact that I heard something — and smiles. Not the public smile. Something quieter and crueler.
"He's all yours."
He adjusts his cuff. The heavy watch catches the fluorescent light and snags in my memory the same way it did in the nightclub bathroom — a hook catching fabric, pulling at something I can't see. He walks down the corridor without hurrying.
I push into the room. Jared is on the medical table, shirtless, left shoulder in a sling, fresh stitches above his eyebrow crusted with dried blood. The fluorescent light is merciless. Something behind his eyes has contracted, pulled inward — a man retreating into a room inside himself and locking the door.
He sees me. His face does three things — relief, raw and involuntary. Then fear. Then the mask sliding back.
"What did Robert mean?" My voice is shaking. "Dirty secrets. What is he talking about?"
He looks at the wall. "He's trying to get in my head before the game. It's what he does."
"That's not what it sounded like."
"Mia, I'm sitting here with six stitches and a shoulder that won't rotate past ninety degrees. I don't have time for Robert Kane's mind games."
I stare at him. He stares at the wall. I want to push — to grab his face and make him look at me the way I did in the living room — but Coach appears in the doorway with trainers and the team doctor and the room fills with bodies and clipboards and medical instruments and the moment closes like a door slamming shut.
I sit in the corridor while they work on him. An hour of fluorescent lights and Robert's words circling like vultures: dirty secrets. The phrase attaches itself to everything — the sobriety, the knife, Coach's whispered argument about that accident.
The team doctor comes out. Shoulder reduced, stitches clean. He'll play tomorrow with heavy taping and painkillers. Then the doctor adds quietly, leaning close: the technical crew examined the rig. The cable wasn't worn. It was cut. Deliberately.
My hands go cold. Robert's calm smile. His unhurried exit. Could've been your neck spoken like a man admiring his own work. The knife, the letters, the driveway — the same escalating pattern, each one closer to the body. Robert isn't taunting Jared. He's hunting him.
The trainers file out. I push through the door. He's on the bed, staring at the ceiling with the blankness of a man loading his next deflection. He looks at me and I see it — the wall going up, the joke forming, the I'm fine that means nothing.
I close the door and stand between him and the exit.
"No. Not this time."
He opens his mouth and I cut him off with a voice I didn't know I had — harder than the one I use on Ron, steadier than the one that breaks on Olivia's couch. "Someone just tried to kill you. Someone has been leaving knives on your door and painting threats on your driveway and you keep burning the evidence and telling me it's fans. Robert Kane stood in this room talking about your dirty secrets like a man holding a detonator." I take a breath. "I'm not leaving until you tell me what he has on you."
His jaw works. "Mia, the game—"
"Forget the game. What is he holding over you?"
"Nothing. He's a jealous—"
"Stop lying to me!" My voice fills the small room and bounces off the tile and the monitors and the metal instruments on the tray. He flinches. I've never raised my voice at him before — never used volume as a weapon in his presence, never filled a room with my anger the way Ron filled rooms with his. The flinch tells me something about both of us.
"I pushed you out of the way of a car." My voice drops, shaking now, the anger collapsing into something rawer. "I stood on a field and told sixty thousand people I loved you. I let you hold my face with bloody hands and kiss me while cameras filmed it. I have earned the truth, Jared. So give it to me or I walk out that door and I don't come back."
The room hums. The monitors beep. He stares at me and I watch the fight drain out of him in stages — like a building losing power floor by floor, lights going out one level at a time. His head drops back against the pillow. His eyes close. The stitches above his eyebrow pull tight.
I've never seen him surrender. Jared Morgan does not give up — he adapts, deflects, builds new walls when old ones fall. But right now, on this medical bed with his shoulder in a sling and his secrets pressing against his chest like something buried alive that's finally running out of air, he stops.
"I'm a murderer, Mia."
The words hit the air. The monitors beep. Somewhere on the other side of the building a stadium full of people is chanting his name — Morgan, Morgan, Morgan — and I stand over the medical bed and the world stops turning.