Faking the Goal (Ashwood Falls #3)

Prologue

Piper

The ring light is doing God's work today.

My skin looks dewy, my hair falls in those effortless waves that actually take forty-five minutes to achieve, and the Cancún sunset is painting the resort pool deck in shades of pink and gold.

Perfect. The kind of lighting that makes followers hit subscribe before they even know what they're subscribing to.

"Okay, loves," I say to my phone, propped on the little portable tripod I carry everywhere.

"Welcome back to day three of the Cancún collab trip.

Most of the other creators headed out for dinner, and I snagged this lounge chair before the light disappeared because this humidity deserves a full skincare segment. "

The comments scroll fast. Heart emojis. Fire emojis. Someone asking where my bikini cover-up is from. Someone asking if Chad and I are engaged yet. The usual.

Four hundred and eighty-seven thousand followers.

Three years of building this platform with curated content, strategic partnerships, and a boyfriend who photographs well.

Chad and I are the couple people tag their friends under with "goals" and "this could be us.

" We've been dating since junior year of college, moved in together last spring, and built a shared brand on being the aspirational, attractive duo that makes love look easy.

It's not easy. But that's not the kind of content that performs.

"So I'm going to grab my vitamin C serum from the room, and then we'll do a full evening routine together. Come with me." I grab the phone, flip the camera so my followers can see the resort hallway, and keep up the running commentary about SPF reapplication schedules as I head toward our room.

The door is propped open with the security latch. Weird. Chad hates leaving the door open because of the air conditioning bill, which is ridiculous because we're not even paying for the room—the resort comped it in exchange for content.

"Babe, you left the—"

The words die in my throat.

The livestream doesn't.

Chad is on the bed. Our bed. The king-size with the white sheets I filmed a flat-lay on this morning, arranging coffee cups and sunglasses like props for a life that apparently isn't real.

He's not alone.

Melissa's blonde hair fans across the pillow. Her eyes go wide when she sees me, and she scrambles for the sheet, pulling it up to her chest. Chad sits up, and for one horrible second, his expression isn't guilt or shame. It's annoyance. Like I've interrupted something.

Like I'm the inconvenience.

"Piper—" he starts.

"What the hell?" My voice comes out strange. Too high. Too controlled. Three years of performing for cameras has trained me to stay composed even while my chest cracks open. "What the actual hell, Chad?"

"Put the phone down," he says.

My hand drops to my side, the phone forgotten. The room smells like her perfume. The Jo Malone I bought her for her birthday.

"How long?" The question scrapes out of me.

Melissa pulls the sheet higher, like Egyptian cotton can shield her from this. "Piper, it's not—"

"Don't." The word comes out sharp enough to cut. "Don't tell me it's not what it looks like. Credit me with enough intelligence to recognize my boyfriend naked in bed with someone who isn't me."

Chad swings his legs over the side of the mattress and reaches for his shorts on the floor. Casual. Like he's getting up from a nap. "Can we not do this right now?"

"When would you prefer? Should I schedule it? Block out some time on the shared calendar between your pool sessions and screwing my best friend?"

"See, this is—" He yanks his shorts on and turns to face me, and there it is.

The expression I've been dreading without knowing it.

Not guilt. Exhaustion. "This is what I'm talking about.

" He gestures at me like I'm an exhibit.

"Everything with you is a performance. A scene.

You can't just react like a normal person—you have to make it a whole production. "

"A production? I just walked in on you—"

"You know what Melissa said to me last week?

" He glances back at her, and something passes between them—a shorthand, a familiarity that tells me this isn't new.

This isn't a one-time mistake fueled by tequila and proximity.

"She said being around you is exhausting.

And she's right. You're exhausting, Piper.

Everything has to be optimized and curated and on brand.

You schedule sex like it's a content calendar. "

"That's not—"

"When's the last time you did anything without thinking about how it would look online? When's the last time you ate a meal without photographing it first? You don't have friends, you have engagement metrics. You don't have a life, you have a feed."

Each sentence lands like a fist. The worst part is the calm. He's not raging. He's reciting. Like he's rehearsed this. Like he's been building this list for months, adding to it every time I asked him to hold the camera or retake a photo or wait for better light.

"Three years," I whisper. "Three years and you couldn't just talk to me?"

"I tried. You were too busy posting about how perfect we were to notice." He pulls a T-shirt over his head. "I'm done pretending, Piper. We're done."

Melissa hasn't moved from the bed. She's clutching the sheet to her chest, eyes darting between Chad and me like she's calculating which side to land on.

My best friend since sophomore year. The one who held my hair back at parties and proofread my captions and told me Chad was "the one" over bottomless mimosas three months ago.

She knew. She sat across from me at brunch, watched me plan our anniversary trip, and she already knew.

"We're done, Piper." Chad's voice drops to that measured tone he uses for sponsored content—warm, reasonable, designed to make the audience agree with him.

"I've been trying to find the right time, but there's never a right time with you because you're always on.

You're too much. You've always been too much. "

Too much.

The words brand themselves somewhere behind my ribs.

"I need to—" My voice doesn't work. I clear my throat. Try again. "I need to go."

"Piper, wait," Melissa says, and the audacity of her reaching one hand toward me while clutching the sheet with the other almost makes me laugh.

Almost.

I back out of the room. Down the hallway. Past the ice machine where Chad and I took a stupid selfie two hours ago, both of us smiling. Only one of us knew it was a lie.

The phone screen catches the fluorescent hall light, and my eyes drop to it.

The red dot. The recording indicator. The viewer count climbing past fifty thousand.

No. No, no, no.

The livestream never stopped. Every word—Chad's, Melissa's, mine—all of it broadcast to a number that's still rising. My face stares back at me in the preview window, mascara smudged, mouth open, looking exactly like a woman whose life just detonated on camera.

My hands shake so hard it takes three tries to hit the button. The stream ends.

Fifty-one thousand viewers.

The sunset is gone. The pool deck glows with underwater lights now, turquoise and artificial, and a couple walks past holding matching cocktails. The woman laughs at something the man says, and the sound scrapes against my skin like sandpaper.

Three years. Three years of planning content together, of building a shared audience, of waking up next to someone and believing—actually believing—that we were solid. That the curated version of us was just the glossy frame around something real.

But what if it wasn't? What if Chad's right and the frame was all there ever was?

The thought makes me want to throw up.

Exhausting. Too much. Can't react like a normal person.

His words loop through my head on repeat, each pass cutting a little deeper.

The worst part isn't that he said them. The worst part is the tiny, vicious voice in the back of my brain whispering: What if everyone thinks that?

What if the 487,000 people who follow you only stick around because your trainwreck is entertaining?

My phone buzzes in my hand. Devon. My manager. I decline the call and turn the screen face-down on my thigh.

I sit there and wait to feel something besides hollow. The breeze off the ocean smells like salt and sunscreen. Somewhere inside the resort, music plays. A normal evening for everyone who isn't me.

Maybe Chad's right about one thing. Maybe I don't know who I am when the camera's off.

Maybe it's time to find out.

I open a browser and type: most remote cabin rentals in the US. The results load slowly on resort WiFi, and I scroll past Maine, past Montana, past every charming little town that probably has a Starbucks and decent cell coverage.

Then I see it. Ashwood Falls, Alaska. Population: small enough that nobody's heard of it. WiFi: barely functional. Nearest major city: far enough away that no one will find me.

The listing shows a one-bedroom cabin with a woodburning stove and a view of the mountains. No ring light. No content studio. No Chad.

The price is reasonable. The reviews mention moose and silence and the kind of cold that makes you forget about everything except survival.

I book it before I can talk myself out of it.

Then I turn off my phone, close my eyes, and let myself fall apart without an audience for the first time in three years.

By morning, the video has eleven million views. My DMs are radioactive. Devon has left a ton of voicemails, each one more frantic than the last.

And I'm on a plane to Anchorage with no plan and the bone-deep certainty that if I don't disappear, the internet will eat me alive.

Ashwood Falls, Alaska.

Where there's barely any WiFi. Where nobody knows my name.

Where maybe I can figure out who Piper Meadows is when she's not performing for the world.