11. Mia
MIA
Tuesday morning, and the house has the sag of a place packing itself back into duffle bags after a weekend it isn’t ready to let go of.
Jax is folding a shirt badly, more crumpling than folding, shoving it into a duffle bag that’s already overstuffed with things he didn’t bother packing properly on the way in either.
Tate’s doing one last lap of the guest room, checking under the bed for a phone charger he swears he brought.
Brooks is already dressed like he’s walking into a client meeting instead of a four-hour drive home, collar crisp despite the fact that nobody at his office will see him for another twenty-four hours.
Nobody wants to leave, and nobody’s saying it, and I’m in the kitchen making coffee in the jersey, sore in ways that make me smile every time I move wrong.
The kitchen still smells faintly of last night’s bourbon and this morning’s bacon, sunlight pooling gold across the counter where the coffee maker sits half-full.
The beach house feels like a world I built with my own hands over five days — one where a jersey means something entirely different than it did on Friday, where four men learned exactly how I like my coffee, where I stopped being the girl hiding from a bad breakup and became someone with an actual, deliberate say in her own life.
I’ve barely thought about the outside world since I sat down at that draft table. I didn’t think I needed to.
I pick up my phone off the counter to check the time. Fourteen missed calls from Bri.
My stomach drops before I process anything else — the number alone, fourteen, a number that doesn’t happen by accident.
Seven from Mom. Twenty-three texts between the two of them.
I stand still in the kitchen, coffee forgotten, and open Bri’s messages first because some instinct tells me that’s where the story starts.
Is that Grant’s house?
Why are you at your stepdad’s place? Who are those guys?
MIA. CALL ME.
Then a screenshot. Jax’s post from yesterday — the draft table, the bourbon, the cheat sheets — and there, out of focus in the background, unmistakably me. Jersey. Coffee mug. #28 across my chest like a brand nobody was supposed to notice.
I recognized Grant from your mom’s old photos. Mia what is going on. Why won’t you answer me. This isn’t funny anymore.
My hands aren’t steady anymore. I set the phone down once, pick it back up, set it down again — some useless instinct that if I stop looking at it the messages might stop being true.
The coffee maker beeps behind me, done, and the sound feels absurd against the noise in my chest, domestic and ordinary in a moment that doesn’t feel like either of those things anymore.
I scroll to Mom’s messages next, and each one hits heavier than the last.
Brianna told me something. Call me NOW.
If you don’t call me back I’m driving down there.
Then, three hours ago: I’m coming.
I call Bri first, because at least Bri will tell me the truth about how bad this actually is.
“Mia, what the hell.” Her voice comes through sharp, worried, angry the way people get when their worry outpaces their patience. “That’s your stepdad. And those are his friends? You’re there alone with them?”
“I’m fine. I’m not in danger.”
“That’s not what it looks like.” A pause, and I can hear her deciding whether to say the next part. “I had to tell your mom, Mia. I was worried about you. What was I supposed to do, sit on a screenshot like that and say nothing?”
“You could have called me first.”
“I did call you. Fourteen times.” Her voice cracks slightly. “You didn’t answer, and I panicked, and I did the thing that felt like it would keep you safe. I’m not sorry for that part. I might be sorry for how it plays out, but I’m not sorry I told someone.”
I don’t have an answer for that. She’s not wrong, not really — from the outside, from a screenshot with no context, this looks like the thing she’s afraid of.
I don’t know how to explain, in the thirty seconds she’s giving me, that the reality underneath the photo is nothing like what she’s imagining.
“I need you to trust me,” I finally say.
“I need you to call me back when I call fourteen times.” The line goes quiet a moment. “Are you safe? Actually safe? Not performing safe for my benefit?”
“I’m safe. I promise you that part is true.”
“Okay.” She doesn’t sound convinced, but she doesn’t push further either. “Your mom’s already on the road, Mia. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“How bad did she sound?”
Bri is quiet for a second too long. “She sounded like a mother who thinks her daughter’s in trouble. I don’t think anything I said made that better.”
“Did you tell her I called you back?”
“I told her I hadn’t heard from you until this morning.” A pause, guilt bleeding through the line. “I probably should have waited to see if you’d call before I said anything at all. I keep going back and forth on whether I made the right call.”
“You did what you thought was right. I get that.” “That doesn’t make me feel better about it.”
“I know. It doesn’t make me feel better either.” I close my eyes, pressing my palm flat against the cool marble of the counter, grounding myself in something solid while everything else feels like it’s tilting. “We’ll figure this out. I promise.”
“What did you tell her, exactly?”
“That you’d been staying at Grant’s beach house. That there were photos of you with some men I didn’t recognize. That you weren’t answering your phone.” A pause. “I didn’t say anything else, Mia, because I don’t actually know anything else. I was hoping you’d tell me I was overreacting.”
I don’t say anything, because I can’t tell her that, and the silence answers the question for both of us. “Mia.” Her voice softens slightly, worry bleeding into something closer to hurt. “Is it what it looks like?” “It’s more complicated than a screenshot can show you.”
“That’s not a no.”
“It’s not a no,” I admit, and something in my chest cracks a little at finally saying it out loud to someone outside this house. “But it’s not what you’re picturing either. Nobody made me do anything. I chose every single part of this.”
“I want to believe that.” She sounds like she’s fighting to keep her voice even. “I really do. But you have to understand how it reads from where I’m standing.”
“I know how it reads.”
“Okay.” Another pause, longer this time. “Just — be careful. Whatever’s happening down there, be careful. And call me back after your mom gets there. I need to know you’re okay.”
“I will.”
The call ends badly — not a fight exactly, but nothing resolved, nothing repaired. I sit at the kitchen counter with my phone in my lap, the coffee gone cold, and try to figure out how four perfect days turned into this in the span of one photo.
The guys have gone quiet in the other room. I can hear the absence of conversation more than any actual sound — bags stop moving, footsteps stop, and I know without looking that they’ve picked up on something wrong through whatever instinct men develop after years of reading each other’s silences.
Jax appears in the kitchen doorway first, half a duffle bag zipped, his usual easy grin nowhere in sight. “Everything okay?”
“Not really.” I hold up my phone like it explains everything, which it does. “Somebody saw your Instagram post. My roommate. Then my mom.”
His face falls in a way I haven’t seen from him all weekend — no performance in it, no quick joke to smooth it over. “Mia, I’m sorry. I didn’t think?—”
“I know you didn’t.” I mean it. It’s not his fault the world exists outside this house; it was always going to find its way in eventually, photo or no photo. “It’s not on you.”
Brooks appears behind him, glasses already on, taking in my face with the same careful read he gives everything. “How bad?”
“My mom’s driving here. She’ll be here by this afternoon.”
Nobody says anything for a moment. Then Tate, from somewhere behind all of them, says the only thing that actually helps: “Whatever you need, we’re not going anywhere until you say we should.”
I don’t have words for how much that means. Five days ago these were strangers with beers and a fantasy football spreadsheet. Now they’re standing in a kitchen offering to face down my mother alongside me, and somehow that feels like the truest proof yet that none of this weekend was a mistake.
Grant finds me on the deck twenty minutes later, phone still in my lap, staring at water that doesn’t look as flat and gold as it did yesterday.
“What happened?”
I hand him the phone instead of explaining. I watch his face while he reads — the screenshot, the messages, the timeline of how this unraveled while we were all still asleep in this house believing the weekend was a sealed thing, a bubble nobody outside could touch.
His face goes still, the way a man gets when he’s already three moves ahead of the problem and calculating the fourth.
“When did she say she’s coming?”
“Three hours ago.” My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. “She’s probably already on the road.”
He rubs a hand across his jaw, thinking, and I watch him do the thing he does with problems at work — turning it over from every angle before committing to a direction.
“Okay.” He says it like he’s already recalculating the whole day around that single fact.
“Okay. We’re not going to pretend this isn’t happening, and we’re not going to scramble like we did something wrong.
Nobody’s hiding. Nobody’s leaving early. ”
“What about Jax and the guys? Should they go before she gets here?”
He considers it for a second, jaw working.
“That’s their call to make. But if she’s coming here ready for a fight, I’d rather she see what this actually is instead of some sanitized version where everyone scattered the second they heard she was on her way.
That looks worse. Like we have something to hide. ”
“Do we?”
“No.” He says it immediately, without hesitation, and something in the certainty of it steadies me more than anything Bri said on the phone. “We don’t.”
He hands the phone back, and for a second neither of us says anything.
The bubble we built over five days — the draft table, the pool, the four men who made me feel wanted instead of confused, the jersey, the whole strange beautiful world of this house — all of it is about to collide with the world outside it, the one where my mother knows my stepfather’s name and my stepfather’s friends’ faces and what that photo implies.
“I’m not going to apologize for any of it,” I tell him, and I mean it, even with my hands still shaking. “Whatever she says when she gets here. I’m not taking any of it back.”
“I know.” He takes my hand, steady, sure, no hesitation in his grip at all. “Neither am I.”
The gulf keeps rolling in front of us, indifferent, and somewhere on a highway an hour or two out my mother is driving toward a truth she isn’t ready for.
Even now, even with my stomach in knots and my best friend furious and my mother’s fear about to walk through that front door, I know something the version of me from five days ago didn’t.
If I could go back — delete the photo, rewrite the weekend, un-choose every single thing that happened in this house — I wouldn’t. Not one second of it.