Chapter 6 Welcome Onboard

I had gotten good at carrying things without showing it.

That was the skill nobody taught you directly. You just developed it over years of sitting at dinner tables where your pain was inconvenient and walking through school hallways where your face was everyone's entertainment. You learned to pack it down somewhere below your ribs and move through the day like nothing was sitting there.

I packed up the withdrawal letter. I packed down my father's voice saying, ' Kiara thinks it's for the best. '* I packed down the look on his face when he said it not guilty, just tired, like a man who had made his choice so many times it didn't cost him anything anymore.

I got dressed. I called a cab. I went to school.

---

The second period was history and I sat in the back for the first time in my life. I was a front row person by instinct not because I was eager but because I liked seeing everything clearly. Today I needed the wall behind me.

Mr. Adisa was talking about colonial trade routes and I was writing the date at the top of my page and not hearing a single word when the classroom door opened and the school secretary leaned in.

"Trixie Baker."

Twenty heads turned.

I closed my notebook and followed her out.

The hallway was empty that time of morning, just the echo of my own footsteps and the muffled sound of lessons bleeding through closed doors. I followed the secretary past the main office and up the east stairwell and I told myself whatever this was I could handle it. I had handled everything else this week. I had become very good at handling things.

---

The room Monica was using was on the second floor, small and neutral, with a folding table and two chairs, and a projector screen that hadn't been fully unrolled. She was already seated when I walked in, folder open, pen in hand.

No Dalton. No Kylian. Just Monica and the quiet efficiency she carried everywhere like a second skin.

"Sit," she said. Not unkindly. Just direct.

I sat.

She walked me through everything without pausing for reaction. Shoot dates three sessions across the next six weeks. Location scouts had already identified two sites. Styling would be handled by the company's in-house team. I would have input but final decisions rested with the creative director. Social media content would be co-managed. There were clauses about public behavior, about association with competing brands, about maintaining what she called brand-aligned conduct.

I wrote everything down.

I was good at that too. Writing things down. Keeping records of what was happening around me so that later, when people tried to rewrite it, I had proof of what was actually said.

"The concept," Monica said, clicking to a new slide, "is authenticity."

I looked at the word on the screen.

"K&L's new youth line is built around the idea that real is more valuable than perfect," she said. "We're not looking for models. We're looking for people." She looked at me over the top of her folder. "Which means we need the actual you. Not the version you put together for a room."

I thought about what Kylian had said in the corridor. That must be exhausting.

"I understand," I said.

Monica studied me for a moment like she was deciding something. Then she nodded once, satisfied, and reached into her folder and slid a document across the table.

It was a contract addendum. Clean white paper, black text, precise language. I scanned it the way my drama teacher had taught us to read anything before we signed it. Parties involved. Terms. Obligations. Duration.

My name was at the top. Just mine. Not my father's. Not a guardian signature line. Mine alone, with a space at the bottom waiting for my signature.

I looked up.

Monica was watching me carefully.

"Kylian had the legal team adjust it," she said. Her voice was even, professional. "You're eighteen. The contract is yours to sign. Your parents have no legal authority to withdraw on your behalf."

I looked back down at the document.

I had spent the entire cab ride to school this morning turning the withdrawal letter over in my head. My father's handwriting. Kiara's decision. The assumption that I would simply accept it the way I had accepted everything else. I had told my father I wasn't withdrawing and I had meant it but somewhere underneath the certainty was a cold thread of fear that it wouldn't matter. That they would find a way around me the way they always did.

Kylian had closed that door before I even knew it was open.

I picked up Monica's pen.

I signed my name at the bottom of the addendum and slid it back across the table.

Monica picked it up, checked the signature, and placed it back in her folder without ceremony.

"Welcome to the campaign," she said. "Officially."

---

I walked out of the briefing room with my notebook under my arm and my signed name somewhere inside that folder and something in my chest that wasn't quite lightness but was the closest thing to it I'd felt in days.

I stood in the corridor for a moment and just breathed. In and out. The kind of breath you take when something you were bracing for doesn't hit you. When you realize you are still standing not because someone caught you but because you caught yourself.

Dalton was leaning against the wall across the corridor.

He had his arms crossed and his bag at his feet and he was looking at his phone but he looked up the moment the door opened. His eyes went to my face and stayed there.

"You actually stayed in," he said.

No mockery. No edge. Just the words, flat and plain, like someone confirming something they genuinely hadn't been certain of.

I looked at him for exactly one second.

Then I turned and walked down the corridor toward my next class.

I was smiling before I'd made it three steps.

I made sure he couldn't see it.