Chapter 21 Jamie
The studio looks exactly the same.
Same worn carpet in the hallway. Same humming fluorescent lights. Same faint smell of stale coffee and nervous sweat that clings to every television green room in America. I walked this corridor eight months ago, alone, confident, ready to defend my work against whatever David Glass threw at me.
I didn't know what was coming. I didn't know that in twenty minutes, my entire life would pivot on a single intake of breath.
Carter's hand is warm in mine. His thumb traces small circles against my palm—a habit he's developed over the past hour, like he needs to keep confirming I'm still here.
I'm not going anywhere. I couldn't if I wanted to. My feet hurt, my back aches, and I'm fairly certain the baby has decided to use my bladder as a squeeze toy.
"You okay?" Carter asks, low enough that the producer walking ahead of us won't hear.
"Ask me again in an hour."
He squeezes my hand and doesn't say anything else. He knows there's nothing to say.
The green room door swings open, and I stop short.
Georgia Mitchell rises from one of the leather chairs, smoothing down her skirt.
I’ve never seen her in person, although I’ve seen plenty of photos of her.
She's tall and elegant, composed in a way that makes me feel every one of my extra pounds and swollen ankles.
The kind of woman who belongs on Carter's arm at political fundraisers.
"Carter." She crosses to him, and for a moment I think she's going to hug him, but she stops just short. "You look... well."
"Georgia. Thank you for arranging this."
"Don't thank me yet. Glass is practically salivating.
I've never seen him this excited about an interview.
" Her gaze shifts to me, and I watch her take in the full picture: my hand in Carter's, my belly straining against my shirt, the obvious reality of what we are to each other. "You must be Jamie."
"Yeah." My voice comes out rougher than I intended. I clear my throat. "Thank you. For helping set this up."
"I didn't do it for you." She says it without malice, just stating a fact. "I did it because Carter asked." A pause. "But you're welcome."
There's an awkward beat where none of us quite know what to do. Carter's ex-fiancée and his pregnant... whatever I am. The etiquette books definitely don't cover this.
Georgia breaks the tension with a small, wry smile. "This is strange, isn't it? I keep waiting for someone to tell me there's a hidden camera."
"If there is, Glass is going to make a fortune."
She laughs—a real laugh, surprised out of her. "He probably would." Her eyes drop to my belly again, and this time she doesn't look away. "How far along are you?"
"Six months."
"You're..."
"Big. Yeah. I know." I rest my hand on my stomach, feeling the baby shift.
"Well." Georgia straightens, all business again. "I should let you prepare. I'll be watching from the booth. If anything goes sideways—"
"It won't," Carter says.
"If it does, I have contacts at three networks ready to run counter-programming. Carter, I know that how we split was the worst way possible."
“You were left with no choice.”
“I know. I still want to make it up to you.” She touches Carter's arm briefly, and I can see the easy familiarity between them. "Good luck. Both of you."
She leaves. The door clicks shut behind her.
Carter exhales slowly. "That was..."
"Weird?"
"I was going to say better than expected."
"Low bar."
He turns to me, and his hands come up to frame my face. His palms are warm against my cheeks, his thumbs brushing just beneath my eyes. "Hey, if you don’t want to go on, I can handle it. I’ve had the training."
"I think it’s a bit late for me to back out now."
I want to lean into him. Want to close my eyes and let him hold me and pretend we're anywhere else. But we're not anywhere else. We're in the green room of David Glass's studio, about to tell the world everything, and there's no version of this where we get to hide anymore.
"No." I put my hands over his, press them tighter against my face for just a second. "We're doing this."
The door opens. A young woman with a headset and a clipboard pokes her head in. "Mr. Crane? Mr. Dean? We're ready for you."
Carter's hands fall away from my face. He offers me his arm instead, formal and steadying, and I take it.
We walk out of the green room and down the hallway toward the studio. The same hallway. The same journey. But everything else is different.
Last time, I was alone.
The set is smaller than I remember. Or maybe it's just that there's no audience. The rows of seats sit empty, a skeleton crew moving efficiently around the cameras.
A hastily arranged interview doesn't leave time to fill a studio with warm bodies, which means it's just us and Glass and whatever he's planning to ask.
David Glass himself is already seated behind his desk, flipping through notes. He looks up as we approach, and his face splits into the kind of grin that makes me want to check for exits.
"Carter. Jamie." He rises, extending his hand to each of us in turn. His grip is firm, professional, but his eyes are gleaming. "I have to say, when Georgia called, I thought someone was playing a prank. The two of you, together, wanting to talk? I almost pinched myself."
"Happy to make your dreams come true, David." Carter's voice is smooth, easy. The politician's mask is firmly in place.
"Oh, you have. You absolutely have." Glass gestures to the couch across from his desk and I note that the two chairs are gone. He’s going to make us sit next to each other. I should say it’s a sly move but it’s a good one.
Carter may be the strategist, but even I know that us snuggling together on a sofa is going to play well.
"Please, sit,” he says. “Make yourselves comfortable. We'll get started in a few minutes."
Comfortable. Right.
I lower myself onto the couch, trying to arrange my body in a way that doesn't make me look like a beached whale. Carter sits beside me, close enough that our thighs touch. His hand finds mine again, threading our fingers together. Glass watches this with barely concealed delight.
"Before we begin," Glass says, "I don’t want to have any restrictions on questions. That’s the deal. I'll ask what I want to ask, and you can answer however you choose. Fair?"
"Fair," Carter says.
I nod. My throat is too tight to speak.
A production assistant counts down. The red light on the main camera blinks on.
And we're live.
"Good evening," Glass begins, his voice shifting into the smooth, practiced cadence of his on-air persona. "Six months ago, I had two guests on this show who didn't know they were about to share a stage. What happened next became one of the most talked-about moments in television history."
He gestures, and on the monitor behind us, footage begins to play. I don't need to look. I've seen it hundreds of times. The internet won't let me forget. But I watch anyway, because that's what you do when someone's showing you the moment that changed everything.
There I am, confident and sharp, mid-sentence about the exposé. The door opens. Carter walks in. I stop talking.
On screen, I watch myself freeze. I watch my nostrils flare as the scent hits me.
I watch Carter falter mid-stride, his composure cracking. We stare at each other across the studio floor, and even in the footage, even through the screen, the tension is palpable.
The clip ends. Glass turns back to us.
"That moment launched a thousand memes. Tabloids went wild. The hashtag CraneAndDean trended for two weeks." He leans forward, elbows on his desk. "So let me ask the question everyone's been asking since that night: what actually happened?"
Carter glances at me. I give him a tiny nod. We agreed he'd take this one.
"It was a scent match," Carter says. "Immediate. Undeniable. I'd never experienced anything like it before."
"And you, Jamie?"
I find my voice. "The same. I didn't even realize he was in the room until—" I gesture vaguely at my nose. "It hit me before I saw him."
"Had you met before?"
"Sort of."
Glass raises his eyebrows. “Sort of?”
Carter's thumb is moving against my palm again.
"At a masquerade gala, three weeks earlier,” he says.
“We never spoke. Never even saw each other's faces. But his scent stayed with me all that time. I’d never experienced anything like it and I had no idea who it belonged to. Not until I walked onto this set."
Glass's eyebrows rise. This is clearly better than he expected. "So you'd been, what, haunted by each other? For weeks? Without knowing who the other person was?"
"Something like that," I say. "I thought I was going crazy. Kept catching traces of it everywhere, except it was never really there. It was just... stuck in my head."
"And then you saw him on my show, and suddenly you knew."
"Suddenly I knew."
"Except the man you'd been dreaming about was Carter Crane the third, and you had just publicly destroyed his reputation."
The word 'destroyed' hangs in the air. I feel Carter tense beside me.
"I published documented facts about corruption," I say evenly. "If those facts destroyed anything, that's not my responsibility. It's theirs."
"Mm." Glass doesn't push—not yet. He's saving that for later. "So here you are, eight months later. Sitting side by side on my show instead of at each other's throats. What happened in between?"
Carter and I exchange another look. This is the part where we're careful.
"We tried to fight it," Carter says. "Both of us. Neither of us wanted this. We told ourselves we could ignore it. That willpower would be enough." Carter's laugh is hollow. "Obviously, that didn't work."
"Why not?"
"Have you ever tried to ignore a prime match?" Carter asks.
Glass leans forward. “So this is a prime match?”
I meet Carter’s eyes. This time I answer. “Yes. We haven’t been tested but it is. Every cell in my body knows it.”