Chapter 5 5

Lila

Jace walked me out of the coffee shop like I was a flight risk.

He didn't touch me, he stayed half a step to my left the entire way across campus, phone in one hand, typing without looking down, in that way he had of running six conversations at once while pretending to only be in one.

"Who are you texting," I said.

"Everyone."

"Define everyone."

"The house. Ivy. A guy I know in the admin building who owes me a favor and can tell me exactly how long Diane Ryder booked the visitors' suite for." He glanced at me, quick, assessing. "You're doing the quiet thing. I don't love the quiet thing."

"I'm processing."

"Process out loud. It's healthier and it's more useful to me."

I almost laughed. Almost. "The girl my boyfriend cheated on me with is the girl my fake boyfriend is supposed to marry. That's not a coincidence, Jace. That's a joke. Somebody up there is writing jokes about my life."

"Okay, first — statistically, it's less insane than it sounds. The boosters, the alliance families, the hockey program, it's all the same forty people at the same twelve parties. Everybody's someone's someone." He pocketed the phone, finally, which meant I was getting his full attention, which somehow made everything feel more serious instead of less. "Second — does Kael know? About Selena and Tyler?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

"You never told him," Jace said.

"I never told anyone her name. Ivy figured it out from the boosters' thing. You figured it out just now from a photo." My voice came out thinner than I wanted. "I didn't exactly want to keep saying it out loud. Saying it makes it a real thing that happened to me instead of a video everyone else watched."

Jace was quiet for a second. For Jace, a second of silence was practically a eulogy.

"He needs to hear it from you," he said finally. "Before his mother says it first, in whatever version of it makes you look worst."

"Why would his mother even know—"

"Because it's her actual job to know things." He said it flatly, no drama, which was how I knew he meant it. "Come on. Everyone's already heading back to the house."

---

The house smelled like cinnamon when we walked in, which meant Mason was stress-baking, which meant the group chat had beaten us there.

"Okay, before anyone says anything," Mason called from the kitchen, oven mitt raised like a courtroom objection, "I want it on record that I said the mom would show up eventually. I said it week one. Theo, tell them I said it."

"You said she'd show up at a game," Theo said from the couch, not looking up from his laptop. "This is not a game."

"It's mom-adjacent. I want partial credit."

"There's no partial credit for—"

"Both of you stop talking," Ivy said. She was sitting cross-legged on the counter like she'd lived here for years, and she was off it and across the room before the door even shut behind me, hands on my shoulders, scanning my face the way she'd done on the porch steps the night everything started. "Hey. You okay?"

"You saw the photo."

"I saw the photo." Her jaw did something tight. "I'm going to need her to explain the audacity of the white coat, but that's a separate conversation."

"Ivy."

"I know. Not the point. Sit." She steered me toward a stool, and Mason slid a plate in front of me without being asked — cinnamon rolls, still steaming, icing melting off the sides — and nobody said anything about the fact that my hands weren't entirely steady when I picked one up.

"So." Jace dropped into the seat across from me and set his phone face-up on the counter between us like evidence. "Here's what I have. Diane booked the visitors' suite through Sunday. Four days. She's already had lunch with two members of the athletics board, and Priya Osei's family flew in separately, which means this isn't a social visit, it's a delegation."

"A delegation for what," I said.

The look Jace and Theo exchanged lasted maybe half a second, but I caught it.

"What," I said. "What was that."

"Nothing," Jace said, too smoothly.

"Theo."

Theo closed his laptop. He looked at me the way he always looked at me — a beat too long, like I was a page he was still reading — and then he said, quietly, "When alliance families travel together, it's usually because they intend to leave with something agreed."

"Agreed. Like—"

"Like an engagement," Ivy said, because someone had to, and she'd never once in her life let a silence do a cruel thing slowly when she could just say it fast.

The cinnamon roll sat in my hand. I put it down.

"Right," I said. "Sure. Obviously. That's — yeah."

"Lila—"

"No, it's fine." It wasn't fine. My voice was doing the thing where it stayed level while everything underneath it didn't. "It's literally the whole reason he hired me. Fake girlfriend, family backs off, everybody wins. This is just the part where the family shows up and doesn't back off. It's in the job description."

"That's not—" Mason started.

The front door opened.

I knew it was Kael the same way I'd known at the party, before I turned around, before he said anything — the room just changed shape around him, the way it always did. He was still in his gear bag and practice hoodie, hair damp, and his eyes found me first, before the plate, before the phone on the counter, before any of them.

"You heard," I said.

"Coach pulled me off the ice to tell me my mother's on campus." His voice was even. Too even. "So yeah. I heard."

"There's more," Jace said.

"I know there's more, you sent me nine texts—"

"Kael." I stood up. I don't know why I stood up. It felt like something I had to be standing for. "The girl your mother brought. Selena Voss."

"I know who Selena is."

"I know her too." My heart was going hard enough that I could feel it in my ears. "She's the girl from the party. The one upstairs. With Tyler. She's the girl he cheated on me with."

The kitchen went very quiet. Even the oven timer seemed to think better of it.

Kael didn't move for a second. Then he set the gear bag down, slowly, deliberately, like he was giving his hands something to do that wasn't anything else, and when he looked back up at me, something had gone flat and cold behind his eyes in a way I'd never seen before — not at the party, not with Tyler, not once.

"You're sure."

"I stood in a doorway and watched her for a full ten seconds. I'm sure."

"Okay." He said it quietly. It was somehow the least okay-sounding okay I'd ever heard. "Okay."

"Kael," Mason said, careful, the way he only ever got careful about one thing.

"I'm fine."

"Your hand's bleeding, man."

I looked down. He'd been holding his keys when he walked in. He was still holding them. His knuckles had gone white around them, and a thin line of red was working its way down the side of his fist, and he looked at it like it belonged to someone else before he opened his hand and let the keys hit the counter.

"I'm fine," he said again, and this time he made it sound almost true. He dragged a breath in through his nose, slow, and when he turned back to me the cold thing was still there but it had gone somewhere underneath, banked, managed. "You don't go anywhere near her alone. Any of them. If my mother wants a meeting, it happens on my terms, in a place I pick, with—"

His phone buzzed against the counter.

Then mine did.

We looked at each other. Nobody in the kitchen breathed while I picked mine up.

Unknown number. A message, short and polite and typed by someone who had never once needed to raise her voice to get anything in her entire life.

Miss Hart. I'd like to invite you to dinner tomorrow evening at the Aldridge Hotel. Just the two of us. I believe we have a great deal to discuss. — Diane Ryder

"Lila?" Ivy said. "What is it?"

I turned the phone around so they could see.

Kael read it once. Something moved through his jaw.

"Just the two of us," he repeated, very quietly. "She didn't invite me."

"No," I said. "She didn't."