The contract was waiting in Otis's SUV — engine running, parked outside Kettle & Clay before my apron was even cold on the counter. He had paperwork spread across the back seat and he was looking at me like a man who'd just pulled the emergency brake on a train and wasn't sure the wheels had stopped.
"I need to be honest with you." He rubbed his jaw. "I've been doing this for fifteen years and I have never hired someone without a background in addiction counseling, crisis management, or at minimum a reference I could call."
"And yet here we are."
"And yet here we are." He exhaled. "You understand why I'm hesitant. This is a man with a court order, a label breathing down his neck, and a history of making people quit in tears."
"You told me that already. Twice."
"I'm telling you a third time because once you sign, you're locked in. Eight weeks. No walking away because he's difficult — and he will be difficult." He held up the contract. "This is legally binding. You leave early, you forfeit the salary."
I looked at the number on the page. Two hundred thousand dollars. My mother's surgery: a hundred and fifty. Dr. Ortiz's voice playing on a loop in my skull — three to four months. The window is narrowing.
"Give me the pen."
Something crossed his face — not guilt exactly, but close enough to share a zip code. He handed me the pen.
I signed every page he pointed to. NDA, liability waiver, confidentiality clause, compensation agreement. My hand was steady. The rest of me was vibrating at a frequency only dogs and desperate daughters could detect.
Otis collected the papers, slid them into his briefcase, and snapped it shut. "Alright. We pick him up from the facility in two hours. I'll brief you on the way."
"Pick him up?"
"The rehab center won't release him without the companion present. In person. Your name's on the paperwork now — you're the reason he walks out of that building today." He started the engine. "No pressure."
I called my mother from the passenger seat while Otis drove. Told her I got a job — a real one, enough money to change things.
"What kind of job, baby?" Careful. The voice she used when she was trying not to sound scared.
"Music industry. Touring assistant. It's legitimate, Mom, I promise."
Silence. A cooking show murmured in the background — some chef building something beautiful out of ingredients we couldn't afford.
"You be careful."
"I will."
"You call me every night."
"Every night."
I hung up and pressed the phone against my chest while the Pacific Coast Highway unspooled outside the window, blue and infinite and completely indifferent to the fact that my entire life had just changed direction in under two hours.
We picked him up from the facility — clean, expensive, more boutique hotel than rehab center. Otis went inside alone. I waited in the SUV, knee bouncing, fingers working the strap of my duffel bag.
Twenty minutes later Otis walked out with a man beside him and my first thought — before context, before logic, before the part of my brain that was supposed to be running background checks — was oh.
He was tall. Lean in a way that walked the line between striking and unhealthy, cheekbones sharp enough to cast shadows. Dark hair, longer than it should be, falling across his forehead like he'd stopped caring about mirrors halfway through rehab.
Tattoos climbing both forearms, disappearing under the rolled sleeves of a black henley. He moved like the air owed him something — long strides, shoulders loose, the kind of walk that made you look twice even if you didn't want to.
Don't. Don't you dare. He's a client. He's your job. Stop looking at his jaw.
I was looking at his jaw. And his hands. And the way his throat moved when he tipped his head back and squinted at the sun like a man who hadn't seen it in months.
He slid into the back seat. I was in the front. He hadn't looked at me yet — was pulling on sunglasses, leaning back, radiating the performative boredom of someone who'd rather be anywhere else.
Then he glanced up. Caught my reflection in the rearview mirror. I watched his eyes travel — slow, unhurried, the kind of look that had probably gotten him into trouble a hundred times before.
"Well." His voice was low, rough, like gravel dragged over velvet. "What a beautiful girl you've brought me, Otis. Is this a welcome-back present?"
My neck went hot. Otis didn't even flinch.
"This is your new sober companion."
The boredom evaporated. He sat forward, sunglasses coming off. "Again? I told you I didn't need one. I told you in the facility, I told you on the phone —"
"And the court told me you don't get a choice." Otis met his eyes in the mirror. "She's the reason you're sitting in this car instead of sitting in that building for another three months. So maybe say thank you."
He didn't say thank you. He looked at me again — properly this time, the flirtation gone, replaced by something colder, more calculating. Measuring. I turned in my seat and met his gaze head-on.
Up close he was — stop it — even more. The gray-green eyes. The mouth that looked like it was permanently deciding between a smile and a weapon. A face built for album covers and arguments.
"Allison," Otis said. "Meet Aiden Blackwell. Aiden — this is Allison Calloway. Your keeper for the next eight weeks."
Allison Calloway.
His face changed. Not all at once — it happened in stages, like watching a window crack in slow motion. The jaw tightened first. Then the eyes, something behind them slamming shut so hard I could almost hear it. His fingers went still on the sunglasses in his hand.
And my stomach fell through the floor of the car because I knew that face. Not from a magazine. From a bench behind a groundskeeper's shed. From a hedge gap at Westridge Prep. From the worst afternoon of my life.
Aiden Blackwell. The boy who put his shoe on my journal. The boy who read my soul out loud and laughed.
Eight years older. Hollowed out by fame and whatever fame did to him. But unmistakable — those eyes, that jaw, that mouth that had always been loading something cruel.
His expression rearranged itself into a smirk that didn't reach his eyes. He leaned back against the seat, crossed his arms, and let his gaze drag over me one more time — but different now. Not the flirtation from before. A dissection.
"Well, well." His voice dropped half a register. "Look how the Notebook Girl grew up."
He tilted his head, studying me like a painting he was deciding whether to buy or burn. "Haven't seen you in a while. You've changed. Almost didn't recognize you — almost."
The nickname hit the base of my skull like a fist. Eight years dull and still sharp enough to draw blood. My nails bit into my palms inside my jacket pockets.
The attraction I'd felt thirty seconds ago curdled into something hot and sick — because my body had wanted him before my brain had caught up, and now my brain was screaming.
"Otis is really scraping the bottom," he said, leaning back. The performance was back — lazy, cruel, armored — but I'd seen the crack. I'd seen the half-second where his face had done something he couldn't control.
I swallowed the earthquake in my chest and held his gaze in the mirror.
"I'm not here to babysit you. I'm here to make sure you don't kill yourself before you're useful again."
His jaw tightened. Otis gripped the steering wheel and said nothing. The Pacific stretched out beside us, blue and vast and completely useless.
I should tell Otis to stop the car. I should get out and walk back to Kettle & Clay and pretend this never happened.
But Dr. Ortiz said three to four months. And the clock doesn't care about the boy who broke you at seventeen.