Chapter Twenty-Seven
MILA
The email arrived just after lunch. I noticed it right away.
The subject line carried the gallery’s name.
My chest lifted with a quiet spark of excitement before I even opened it.
That gallery had been the first place outside of Colleen’s Boardwalk Studio to show genuine interest in my work.
The curator had reached out weeks ago after seeing photographs of my charcoal pieces online.
She had talked about an exhibit. About the way the rawness in the work felt “intentional and alive.”
Until now, the conversation had carried nothing but enthusiasm.
I opened the message beneath the jacaranda tree near the edge of campus, its faint honeyed scent drifting through the air.
The tone had changed. Not dramatically—just enough to introduce hesitation. The email remained polite, full of professional courtesy. The curator thanked me again for sharing my portfolio and expressed continued admiration for the work.
Then the hesitation arrived.
Recent information had surfaced that might create complications for the gallery if they moved forward with the exhibit on the original timeline. She emphasized that they were not canceling the opportunity entirely. They simply needed to reconsider the schedule.
I read the paragraph again and understood what the curator hadn’t written. Someone with influence had spoken to them and applied pressure in the right place to make them hesitate.
The kind of pressure galleries rarely ignore from a collector, someone whose money mattered more than an unknown artist’s exhibit. They’d made sure the right concern reached the right ear. I closed the email without responding and slipped my phone back into my bag.
For several minutes, I remained seated beneath the tree, watching students move across the courtyard in scattered groups. Conversations drifted through the air around me. Laughter from the tennis courts carried faintly across campus.
Nothing about the day suggested the ground beneath my future had shifted.
Luke’s call from Michigan. Questions planted in the right places. Quiet doubt introduced where it could do the most damage.
My fingers curled around the strap of my bag. The first move had been against him. Now the pressure had reached me.
The second sign arrived before the school day ended.
I had just finished my last class when a message appeared on the student portal asking me to stop by the counseling office before leaving campus. The request carried no urgency, only a gentle reminder about student wellness resources and upcoming academic planning meetings.
The tone felt harmless. Still, a quiet unease pressed in my chest as I walked across the quad toward the administrative building.
The counseling office sat on the second floor, tucked behind a glass wall that overlooked the courtyard. The receptionist greeted me with a polite smile before directing me into a small conference room where two administrators were already waiting.
Both women rose when I entered. One of them gestured toward the chair across the table. “Thank you for coming in, Mila.”
I sat down slowly. The room smelled faintly of lemon polish and printer ink. A small stack of papers rested neatly on the table between us.
Neither woman looked hostile. If anything, their expressions carried a careful softness that made the conversation feel even more deliberate.
“We wanted to check in,” the first administrator began, folding her hands together. “There has been a great deal happening around you recently, and our responsibility is to ensure our students have the support they need to succeed academically.”
I waited.
The second administrator leaned forward slightly. “Your teachers speak very highly of your work. You have consistently maintained a strong performance, and we want to ensure nothing interferes with that as graduation approaches.”
The concern in her voice sounded genuine. Almost convincing. “Of course,” I replied.
“There have been a few anonymous communications suggesting that the recent events involving your family may be placing additional strain on you.”
The implication beneath it wasn’t subtle. Someone had taken the time to reach out to the counseling office—but about what? Edwardo and his stepbrother?
I kept my expression neutral. “I’m managing my workload,” I answered. “My grades reflect that.”
“They do,” the first administrator confirmed quickly. “This isn’t about discipline. We simply want to ensure that outside stress isn’t affecting your academic commitments.”
This had to do with my scholarship at Blackwood. Another pressure point. The realization sank in slowly. Someone was feeding small pieces of information into every system connected to my future.
Luke’s hockey program. My gallery opportunity. Now the school itself.
I folded my hands together on the table. “I appreciate the concern,” I replied evenly. “But I’m not struggling academically, which means I’m meeting the requirements of my scholarship.”
The two administrators exchanged a brief glance. “Of course,” the second administrator replied. “We simply wanted to check in and offer support if needed.”
The conversation ended there, just a quiet suggestion that someone had begun planting doubts about my stability.
By the time I stepped outside the building, the afternoon sun had dropped low enough to stretch long shadows across the courtyard.
Students moved toward the parking lot in loose clusters. Everything appeared exactly as it had that morning. But the events unfolding had become impossible to ignore.
Someone was dismantling the edges of my future. Deliberately. One small question at a time.
I met Luke after sunset. I needed the ocean around me—the wind and restless tide echoing the storm building in my chest.
It was the same stretch of beach where we always went when everything else felt too crowded to think clearly. The tide had started coming in, the dark water rolling steadily toward the shore beneath a sky fading into deep blue.
He stood a few yards from the sand when I arrived, hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans.
When he saw me, his posture shifted slightly. The tension in his shoulders eased just enough that I could see how tightly he’d been holding himself together.
I stopped in front of him. “We need to talk.”
His gaze searched my face immediately. “What happened?”
I told him everything. The gallery email. The counseling meeting. The anonymous concerns.
I watched the understanding settle across his expression piece by piece as the pattern revealed itself.
“They’re widening the pressure,” he said softly.
“Yes.”
The wind moved across the water, lifting my hair to dance around me.
Luke stared out toward the horizon, the wind pushing his hair back from his forehead.
“They started with Michigan,” he continued quietly. “Now they’re moving through anything connected to you.”
The conclusion had already formed long before I reached the beach. “The gallery backed off today,” I told him. “Not outright. Just hesitation. Someone important to them suddenly had concerns.”
Luke’s gaze sharpened immediately. “A collector?”
“Most likely.” I watched another wave collapse against the shoreline. “The curator didn’t say it directly, but galleries don’t stall exhibits unless someone with money asks them to.”
Luke exhaled slowly through his nose. “So they’re leaning on the people around us. Not us directly.”
It hit harder now that it had been spoken aloud. Carefully chosen pressure points. “They’re not attacking,” I said. “They’re introducing doubt.”
“Yes.” His voice carried quiet certainty. “They only need a few people to hesitate. A coach. A curator. An administrator. Once that happens, opportunities start disappearing on their own.”
The calm way he laid it out made the strategy feel colder. More deliberate. “They’re dismantling things piece by piece,” I said.
“Exactly.”
The tide pushed another dark ribbon of water across the sand near our feet.
Neither of us spoke, and then Luke’s hand found mine. His fingers closed around it automatically, grounding in a way that steadied something in my chest.
“They think pressure will make us react,” he continued. “Pull back. Make mistakes. Turn on each other.”
“And if we don’t?”
His gaze shifted to me. “Then they escalate.”
The answer came without hesitation. I absorbed that quietly. He was right. This wasn’t the end of it. It was the opening move. “And who do you think it is?” I asked.
Luke’s jaw clenched slightly. “Dunn is the obvious choice.”
“Elise has motive too.”
“Yeah, she does.”
The wind lifted the edge of my jacket again. Luke stepped closer without thinking, his hand falling to my waist as though the movement had always belonged there.
“Either way,” he continued, “whoever started this understands exactly where to push.”
My fingers curled around his. “So what do we do?”
Luke looked back toward the dark water. When his gaze returned to mine, something in it had focused. “We stop reacting.” The words landed quietly. “We watch,” he continued. “We document everything. Every call. Every email. Every conversation.”
I studied his face. “To prove what they’re doing?”
“Not just that.”
The wind shifted across the water, pushing his jacket lightly against his shoulders.
“People who move this carefully are always hiding something,” he went on. “Pressure like this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It means they have their own vulnerabilities.”
Understanding began to settle slowly. “So we wait for them to slip.”
Luke’s gaze held mine. “Yes.”
The single word carried quiet certainty.
“They’re digging at our futures,” he continued. “Which means somewhere in all of this they’re leaving fingerprints. And when we find them—we stop defending ourselves.”
“We turn it back on them.”
The ocean rolled in behind him, steady and relentless. Standing there with his hand around my waist and the wind off the water pressing against us.
This wasn’t going to end quietly. Whoever had started this believed they could dismantle our futures without ever showing their face.
But Luke wasn’t the kind of person who stayed on defense for long.
Something shifted inside me. Not fear. Resolve.
The ocean rolled steadily behind us, waves breaking against the shore in a rhythm older than everything happening around us.
The pressure had begun. The quiet campaign against our futures was already moving.
Whoever had started this believed doubt would break us apart. They had miscalculated the one thing Luke and I refused to surrender—each other.