Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
ROSE
I didn’t sleep. I wasn’t going to pretend I tried.
Instead, I sat on the floor of my bathroom with my back against the tub and my phone in my hand, watching that video for the thirty-seventh time like some kind of emotional self-harm.
The footage was grainy. Shaky. Shot from across the barn like whoever held the camera knew they shouldn’t be holding it.
Three seconds of Graham catching me when I slipped. His hands at my waist. My hands on his shoulders. Our faces close enough that from the angle, it looked like something it wasn’t. Me and Graham hugging.
Except his name wasn’t Graham.
His name was Fraser Kincaid, and millions of people knew him, and I’d told him about my dead parents in a barn while rain hammered the roof, and the whole time he’d been someone else entirely.
I closed the app. My eyes were swollen and my throat ached and the tile was cold under my legs. I should get up. I should go to bed. I should do literally anything other than sit here in the dark, replaying the moment a stranger held me and I’d been stupid enough to feel safe.
I didn’t get up.
By dawn, I’d moved to the kitchen, waiting for the hollow feeling behind my ribs to turn into something I could use.
Anger would be good. Anger I could work with.
But all I had was the dull, heavy ache of someone who’d unlocked a door she’d spent years nailing shut, only to find out the person on the other side had been performing the whole time.
Had he been performing?
I shoved that thought down before it could take root.
The knock came at seven-twelve. I know the time because I was staring at the microwave clock, willing the numbers to mean something other than another minute of this.
It wasn’t a polite knock.
I crossed the room. Opened the door without checking the window first, because some part of me already knew, and a different part of me wanted to see his face when he tried to explain.
Graham stood on my porch.
He looked wrecked. Dark circles, tight jaw, hair still damp from a shower that clearly hadn’t done a damn thing for him. He had the posture of a man bracing for impact. Feet planted, shoulders set, hands nowhere near his pockets.
Good.
“Rose.” His voice was rough. Careful. The voice of someone approaching a horse that might kick.
Smart man.
“Come in,” I said.
He blinked. He’d been ready for the door in his face. I could see the whole speech dissolving behind his eyes. The invitation threw him, which was exactly where I wanted him. Off balance. On my turf. In my space.
I stepped back. He stepped in.
I let the silence do its work. Watched him stand in the middle of my living room trying to figure out what to do with his hands while the morning light cut across the floor between us.
“Fraser Kincaid,” I said.
Not a question. A verdict.
“Aye,” he managed.
“Fifty million subscribers.”
“Aye... but my name is Graham.” I could hear him reaching for it like a lifeline. “Graham Fraser Kincaid. Fraser’s my middle name, it was my mum’s maiden name. Kincaid from my father. I didn’t make Graham up. I just didn’t give you the rest.”
I let that sit for exactly two seconds.
“You didn’t give me the rest,” I repeated. “That’s what you’re going with. You left out the part where you’re one of the most famous people on the internet, and you want credit for getting your first name right?”
He had the decency to look like he wished the floor would swallow him.
“You booked my ranch under a fake company name. Walked into my cabin. Let your entire team lie to my face about who you were and why you were here.” I held up a hand before he could open his mouth.
“And don’t. Whatever you’re about to say, don’t.
I’ve been awake all night and I promise you I’ve already imagined every version of your excuse and found them all pathetic. ”
His jaw worked. But he didn’t speak.
At least he could follow instructions.
“You stood in that barn while I told you how my parents died.” My voice was steady. The kind of calm that costs more than screaming. “While I told you what it’s like to grow up with photographs instead of memories. While I handed you pieces of myself I don’t hand anyone.”
“I know,” he said quietly.
“Was any of it real?” The question escaped before I could catch it. “Your father. Losing his business. The drinking. Any of it?” I watched his face for the tell, the flicker of a man caught in another lie. “Or was that just a line you dropped because I went first?”
His composure broke. Not the polished expression of a man who’d spent a decade performing for cameras. Real pain, quick and uncontrolled, that he couldn’t mask fast enough.
“My father drank himself to death when I was nineteen years old.” His voice was low, stripped down to nothing. “That’s not a story I tell for content. That’s not a story I tell anyone.”
I believed him.
I fucking hated that I believed him, because it would’ve been so much easier to file this whole thing under con artist and move on.
Burn the bridge, salt the earth, done. But the way his voice broke on nineteen, that wasn’t a performance.
I’d spent enough years around grief to know the real thing when I heard it.
Which made everything worse. Because it meant the connection I’d felt in that barn had been real. Built on actual shared damage and actual honesty, except his honesty had a fifty-million-subscriber-sized crater in the middle of it.
“But you hid who you actually were while you watched me fall apart.” My throat was tightening but I refused to let it show. “Was it for content? Research for your next video? Hey everyone, Fraser Kincaid here, today I made a ranch owner cry in a barn—”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was it like?” I was close enough now to see every detail I didn’t want to see.
The tension in his jaw. The shadows under his eyes.
The way his hands stayed open at his sides like he was making a point of not reaching for me.
“Because from where I’m standing, you played the regular guy, no fame, no followers, just Graham, so I’d let my guard down. And it worked. Congratulations.”
He was quiet for a long moment. I watched him cycle through responses the way I’d watch a horse decide whether to bolt or submit, the calculation happening in real time, visible if you knew where to look.
“I was scared,” he said finally.
I hadn’t expected that.
“I was scared that if you knew who I was, you’d never see me.
You’d just see Fraser Kincaid, the brand, the persona, the guy who does stupid stunts for cameras.
” He swallowed. “And then I got to know you, and I kept not telling you because I didn’t want to lose whatever this was. Whatever we were becoming.”
Part of me wanted to soften. The rest of me remembered he’d had days to tell me the truth and chose not to.
“So you decided for me.” I dropped my voice because I’d learned a long time ago that quiet lands harder than volume. “You decided I couldn’t handle it. That I’d see the fame and not the person.” My jaw tightened. “Like I was too fragile, or too naive, or too—”
I stopped. Because the next word was broken, and I wasn’t giving him that.
“You don’t get to make that call,” I said. “Nobody does.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because from what I can tell, you’ve spent ten years pretending for millions of people who don’t actually know you. And maybe you’ve done it so long you’ve lost track of where the persona ends and you begin.”
That landed. I saw it hit, the stillness of a man with nothing left to hide behind.
“The video,” he started.
“Is everywhere. Posted on your official channel. My brother called me at eleven last night to ask why the internet thinks I was making out with Fraser Kincaid in my barn.”
“I didn’t post it. Neither did my team. Jamie swears it wasn’t her, and I believe her. I’m going to find out who did.”
“Great. You do that.” I crossed my arms because my hands were starting to shake.
“Meanwhile, every person in this town who finally stopped calling me the Silicon Valley brat with a hobby ranch is going to see that video and decide I’m the woman who got caught with some YouTuber in her barn. That’s the story now.”
“I understand if you want us gone,” he said. “Today. All of us. I’ll have the team packed and off the property by noon.”
“No.”
The word came out harder than I intended.
He stared at me.
“Your group stays through the booking.” I kept my voice flat. Professional. Even though every part of me felt scraped raw. “I’m not punishing your team for your choices.”
That was the noble version. The version that sounded like principle instead of desperation.
The truth was simpler and more humiliating: I couldn’t afford to lose this booking.
Two weeks, four cabins, the full guest house.
Biggest reservation of the quarter. Refunding it would mean dipping into operating funds that were already stretched so thin I could see through them.
Feed costs up. New fencing not cheap. And that vendor payment Denise had flagged last week still hadn’t cleared.
I needed the money.
Underneath the money, there was the other thing. The thing I wasn’t going to examine, not now, not while he was standing three feet from me looking like that. Jaw tight, standing there absorbing every word I threw without flinching.
He deserved all of it.
That didn’t explain why watching him take it made my throat ache.
“Your group stays,” I repeated, steadier. “But you and I are done. Don’t talk to me. Don’t approach me. Don’t try to explain or apologize or fix anything. You’re a guest. I’m the owner. That’s the line. Cross it and Hank will escort you off the property personally.”
“Rose—”
“We’re finished.” I walked to the door and pulled it open. Morning sunlight flooded in, obnoxiously bright. “Get out.”