Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
GRAHAM
At some point around three in the morning, I stopped pretending to sleep.
Got out of bed. Sat in the chair by the window and stared at the dark shape of Rose’s cabin across the property.
Dex’s voice looped in my head. Tell her tomorrow. Before someone else does.
Tomorrow was already here.
I should have told her in the barn. Should have said the words before she told me about the crash, before she let me hold her, before she looked at me like I was someone who deserved to be trusted.
Instead I’d stood there soaking wet, listening to her hand me the most painful pieces of herself, and I’d kept my mouth shut because the truth would have ruined the moment.
Selfish. That’s what it was. Dressed up as protection, packaged as I’ll tell her when the time is right, but underneath all of it, selfish. I wanted her to keep looking at me the way she had. I wanted one more day of being Graham before Fraser Kincaid walked in and wrecked everything.
Rose’s cabin was dark. She was sleeping. She was fine. She’d wake up and I’d tell her the truth and deal with whatever came next.
I told myself a lot of things.
Around four, I gave up on sleep entirely. Made coffee. Paced the cabin, rehearsing conversations that all ended the same way: Rose’s face closing off and a door shutting between us.
Out of habit, I picked up my phone. I’d turned off notifications hours ago, but the screen showed a wall of missed calls.
My hands went still.
I opened the channel app.
For a second, I didn’t understand what I was looking at.
The dashboard numbers were wrong. Wildly, impossibly wrong.
Subscriber count had spiked by over three hundred thousand since yesterday.
Real-time views were running at a rate I hadn’t seen since the Kilimanjaro episode.
The analytics graph looked like a heart attack.
But we hadn’t posted anything. We’d been dark for days. There was nothing on the schedule.
I scrolled to the uploads.
And there it was.
Posted yesterday. Uploaded from Jamie’s credentials. Already sitting at three million views with a trajectory that said it was just getting started.
The thumbnail was Rose.
Rose in my arms. In the barn. The moment she’d slipped and I’d caught her. Her hands on my shoulders, my hands at her waist, our faces close enough that from the right angle it could look like something it wasn’t.
The caption read:
Fraser Kincaid’s Mystery Girl — Who Is She?
My stomach turned to ice.
I hit play. The footage was shaky, shot from a distance, through the barn door, probably a phone propped against something or held low.
You could see the rain. The horses. Rose losing her footing on the wet straw.
Me catching her. The way I’d held on a beat too long, and the way she’d let me, and then the way she’d pulled back and I’d let her go.
Three seconds. Maybe four.
In the comments, it was already a love story. Or a scandal. Or both.
Fraser Kincaid has a girlfriend???
Who is this girl she’s so lucky
They were definitely making out before this clip starts
She’s not even that pretty lol
I closed the app. Opened it again. Stared at the upload timestamp and tried to think through the nausea. Jamie had access to the channel. Jamie had been filming all day. Jamie had been glued to Denise in the lounge last night, the two of them giggling at a phone screen.
But the caption. Fraser Kincaid’s Mystery Girl. That wasn’t Jamie’s style. Jamie wrote sharp, clever hooks, not tabloid clickbait. This read like someone who understood virality but not the brand. Someone who’d seen an opportunity and grabbed it not thinking about, or caring about, who got hurt.
It didn’t matter who posted it. Not right now. What mattered was that Rose was across the property, asleep or awake, and in a few hours she was going to find out that three million strangers had watched the most private moment of her week and turned it into entertainment.
And she was going to find out who I was.
Not from me. Not the way I’d planned. From the internet. From strangers. From a clickbait caption and a comment section full of people dissecting her life like it belonged to them.
I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my hands against my face and breathed.
Tell her tomorrow. Before someone else does.
Too fucking late.
Dawn came slow and gray. I showered without feeling the water. Dressed without seeing my clothes. Poured the cold coffee down the sink and made a fresh pot.
By seven, I was pacing my cabin, running through conversations in my head. Explanations, apologies, arguments. None of them felt right. None of them felt like enough.
I was still pacing when the knock came.
Not a polite knock. Not a guest-checking-in knock.
A knock that said open this door or I’ll break it down.
I knew who it was before I turned the handle.
At least, I thought I knew.
To my surprise, Kaya stood on my porch in the morning light, arms crossed, her dark eyes sharp and assessing. She was wearing her ranch jacket and a look that said she hadn’t come for small talk.
“Hey, Graham.” She tilted her head slightly. “Or should I say Fraser?”
The floor dropped out from under me.
“Kaya—”
“Can I come in?”
I stepped back. She stepped in, glanced around the cabin like she was cataloging the evidence of a sleepless night. The rumpled bed. The phone facedown on the chair like I couldn’t stand to look at it anymore.
“So,” she said, turning to face me. “Fifty million subscribers.”
“Aye.”
“Fraser Kincaid. Adventure travel. Skydiving off cliffs and charming the camera.” She paused. “I watched some of your stuff. The Iceland series was solid.”
I didn’t know what to do with that. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” Her tone shifted, the warmth draining out of it. “Now let me tell you what you’ve done.”
I braced for anger. What I got was worse.
Kaya sat down on the arm of the chair by the window, composed and deliberate, like she wanted to make sure every word landed exactly where she aimed it.
“Rose moved here six years ago,” she said.
“Bought sixty acres of nothing with her inheritance, and half the town decided who she was before she’d finished unpacking.
A Silicon Valley brat spending tech money on a vanity project.
People smiled to her face and placed bets behind her back on how long she’d last.”
I stayed quiet. Sensed she wasn’t done.
“You have to understand this town,” Kaya continued.
“It runs on old families. Ranching dynasties that go back four, five generations. People whose grandparents built the church and whose names are on the road signs. And when those families lose ground, when the money dries up or the land gets sold off, they don’t just lose property.
They lose standing. And standing is the only currency that matters here. ”
She paused, like she was deciding how much to say.
“Denise’s people used to be one of those families.
Her grandmother owned half the valley at one point.
Now Denise works for the outsider who bought land that used to be theirs.
” Kaya shrugged, but the gesture wasn’t casual.
“Most people around here handled the shift fine. Some didn’t.
And Rose walked into all of that without knowing any of it, because nobody told her. They just watched.”
Kaya leaned forward slightly.
“Do you have any idea how hard she worked for people to just see her? Not the money. Not the dead parents. Not the sad orphan story. Just Rose, the woman who runs a ranch and takes care of horses nobody else wants.”
The words landed somewhere I couldn’t defend.
“And now,” Kaya said, her voice dropping, “every single person in this town will see a video of her in the arms of one of the most famous people on YouTube. And they’ll not see Rose the rancher anymore.
They’ll see the girl who got mixed up with some celebrity.
The outsider who brought the circus to town. ”
“I didn’t post—”
Kaya held up a hand. “Doesn’t matter. Somebody did and the damage is the same. She spent years building a reputation, a place where she belonged. And one viral video just reduced all of it to gossip.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed because my legs didn’t feel reliable.
“Is Rose okay?” I asked, and heard how stupid the question was even as it left my mouth.
Kaya looked at me for a long beat. “She’s not answering her phone. Still in her cabin. So no, Graham. I don’t think she’s okay.”
Neither of us spoke. There wasn’t anything to say that would have helped.
“I was going to tell her,” I said quietly. “Yesterday. Dex told me—”
“But you didn’t.”
I flinched. Because she was right.
Kaya stood up, smoothing her jacket like the conversation was a task she’d completed.
“Look,” she said, and for the first time her tone softened toward sympathy. “I’m not going to pretend I didn’t fangirl a little when I realized who you were. The skydiving episode in New Zealand? Incredible.”
I huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“But Rose is my friend,” she continued. “My boss. And the most stubbornly good person I know. So if you’re planning to apologize, save your breath. Just fucking leave. She doesn’t need your circus.”
“I’m not leaving. Not until she tells me to.”
“No?” Kaya walked to the door and paused with her hand on the frame. “Then fix it.”
She left.
Kaya’s words kept cycling through my head.
They’ll not see Rose the rancher anymore.
And underneath that, the suffocating knowledge of what I’d cost her.
Not just privacy. Not just trust. Years of work.
Years of earning something I’d never had to earn, because I’d been born with enough charm and enough luck that the world handed me things I didn’t deserve.
Rose had built her place in this old town brick by brick, and I’d helped knock it down in a single night.
I stood up. Grabbed my jacket.