14. Sloane
Sloane
I stand in the middle of my office while three screens fill with headlines, screenshots, reposts, and commentary from people who have suddenly decided they understand my entire career because they’ve read six sentences stripped of context.
The email itself isn’t even entirely fake. That’s the worst part.
If it were fabricated from nothing, legal could dismantle it cleanly. IT could prove it. Crossridge could issue a denial strong enough to slow the spread before the story fully rooted itself in public opinion.
But this is worse than a forgery. This is a distortion.
Someone took real internal communications, cut away timestamps, removed replies, rearranged pieces, and stitched fragments together until crisis management looked like intent, and strategy looked like deception. My name is at the center of a narrative I did not create, but now apparently own.
FAKE FIANCéE? LEAKED EMAILS SUGGEST CROSSRIDGE EXECS COORDINATED RELATIONSHIP TIMELINE.
PR DIRECTOR SLOANE PARKER ACCUSED OF STAGING CORPORATE ROMANCE FOR INVESTOR CONTROL.
CROSSRIDGE SCANDAL DEEPENS AFTER ALLEGED INTERNAL EMAILS SURFACE.
The center screen refreshes again, and another post rises to the top.
THIS WAS HER IDEA.
My stomach turns.
Dana swears softly behind me. “Okay. I officially hate everyone.”
I barely hear her because the screenshot I’m looking at is from an email I actually wrote. The subject line is mine. The first sentence is mine. Everything after that has been carved into something else.
The original message was about stabilizing media response after the first leak. Managing public perception. Containing speculation before it reached investors and board channels. Standard crisis language written under pressure in the middle of a story already moving too quickly.
Now it reads like I designed the relationship from the beginning. Like I calculated every touch, every appearance, every staged moment between Marcus and me, and then sold it to the public as something real.
My hand tightens around the edge of my desk before I realize I’m gripping it. I know this feeling. Not the exact circumstances, not the company, not the scale. But this is familiar enough that my body recognizes it before my mind finishes putting words to it.
Real information turned unrecognizable. Context removed until truth becomes whatever version someone else needs it to be, and my career reduced to something strangers can dissect for sport.
“You need to sit down,” Dana says carefully.
“I’m fine.”
“You look like you’re about to throw your laptop through a window.”
“That would be unprofessional.”
“That wasn’t a denial.”
My voice stays calm when I answer, which is how I know I am closer to losing control than I want to admit. “Legal has the originals?”
“Already pulling them. IT says the threads were altered. They’re checking access logs and metadata now.”
“That matters internally.”
Dana’s expression tightens. “It matters publicly, too.”
“No.” I look back at the screens. “Publicly, this is already gone.”
Because that is how these things work. People do not wait for the correction when the accusation feels better.
They don’t share the retraction with the same urgency.
They don’t care about metadata when a screenshot confirms whatever version of the story already made them feel smart for suspecting it.
The story practically writes itself. The ambitious PR director manipulates a billionaire executive, turns a corporate strategy into a public spectacle, and manufactures a wedding timeline to keep the lie alive.
God.
The wedding timeline.
I close my eyes for half a second, just long enough for the memory of the studio to cut through me. Marcus backing me without hesitation. His hand around mine. The controlled steadiness of his voice when he made my lie sound like something we had both chosen.
We gave them escalation. Someone turned it into proof. My phone vibrates across the desk.
Marcus.
I let it ring. It stops, then starts again almost immediately.
Dana watches me from near the windows, her face drawn with concern she is trying very hard to disguise as professionalism. “You should probably answer him.”
“No.”
“Sloane—”
“No.”
The word comes out sharper than I intend, and Dana falls silent at once.
I stare at Marcus’s name on the screen while something cold settles under my ribs. Under the humiliation and panic is the kind of fury that makes my hands feel too steady; there is a thought I do not want to look at directly.
I knew this would happen.
Not this exact leak or the exact words. Or the fact that my name is dragged through corporate fraud hashtags before breakfast, but the exposure, public humiliation, and loss of control.
People taking pieces of my life, my work, my decisions, and rearranging them until I no longer recognize myself in the version being discussed.
This is exactly why I don't trust proximity, or powerful men who insist they're trying to help.
My ex didn’t leak private information because he hated me enough to lose control. He leaked it because it gave him leverage. Because once he couldn’t keep me, he found another way to make sure I still had to react to him.
It was control dressed up as consequence, disguised damage dressed up as necessity. And now I am standing in my office watching another man’s crisis swallow my name whole.
Marcus didn’t create the leak. I know that.
But rational thought is not holding the strongest position right now, because if Marcus had not pushed this strategy harder, if he had not kept escalating, if he had not decided we could survive more visibility because the company needed it, none of this would have had enough shape to destroy me with.
The office door opens somewhere beyond the glow of the screens. Evan appears first, speaking quietly to someone in the hallway before stepping aside. A second later, Marcus walks into the office.
Dana straightens near the windows.
“Marcus.”
His voice is controlled. “Give us a minute.”
Dana hesitates, and it almost breaks me. Not because I want her to stay, exactly, but because she sees enough of me to know leaving me alone with him might not be safe in the emotional sense. I appreciate that more than I can explain right now.
“She can stay,” I say.
Marcus walks farther into the office anyway, his attention fixed on me as if the screens, the headlines, the entire collapsing structure around us are background noise compared to whatever he sees in my face.
“The emails were manipulated,” he says.
“I know.”
“We’re tracing the source.”
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it, sharp enough to hurt on the way out. “Great. I’m sure that fixes everything.”
His jaw tightens. Good. I want him uncomfortable. I want someone else carrying even a fraction of what this feels like for once.
“Sloane.”
I look at him then, and it‘s a mistake.
Marcus looks exactly the way he did on the rooftop when he almost told me something real.
Controlled on the surface, but with strain underneath now that I know how to see it.
There is anger in his expression too, though not at me.
At the leak. At the person behind it. At the fact that this damage exists at all.
For one terrible second, part of me still wants to trust that. Anger is safer, so I choose it.
“You don’t get to look concerned.”
Dana inhales softly.
Marcus doesn’t react right away. “You think I’m responsible for this.”
“Are you?”
“No.”
No hesitation or careful calculation. Not even a flinch. It should help. Instead, something inside me snaps tighter because I believe him. I believe that he believes he didn’t cause this, that he thinks intent clears enough space between his choices and the wreckage now sitting on my screens.
“You wanted escalation,” I say. “You wanted deeper commitment. More visibility. More pressure. Congratulations, Marcus. Now the entire internet thinks I manufactured a relationship with my boss for corporate leverage.”
His expression hardens slightly. “That isn’t what happened.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No.”
“You pushed this forward every time I said it was becoming dangerous.”
“Because the attacks kept escalating.”
“And now my career is collapsing publicly anyway.”
Dana slips out quietly and the door closes behind her with a soft click that somehow makes the room feel smaller.
Marcus takes one careful step closer. “Your career is not collapsing.”
I laugh before I can stop it. The sound comes out soft, disbelieving, and nothing like humor.
“Analysts are reposting altered emails with my name attached to them. Investors are asking whether Crossridge Communications manipulated shareholder perception. I am trending under corporate fraud hashtags.” I fold my arms tightly because if I don’t, I might start moving in ways I can’t control. “But sure. Completely stable.”
“We’ll correct the record.”
“There it is.”
His brow furrows. “What?”
“The fix.” I gesture toward him, toward the entire controlled force of him standing in my office, like proximity alone can push the walls back into place. “That thing you do where you decide you can contain the damage if you move fast enough.”
“Because I can help.”
“I don’t want your help.”
“Sloane—”
“No.”
The word cuts through the office hard enough that Marcus stops.
“You don’t get to fix this for me,” I say, quieter now, which somehow makes it worse. “You don’t get to manage it or contain it or make another strategic decision about how much fallout I can survive.”
“I’m trying to protect you.”
The sentence enrages me, and heat flashes through my chest so fast it almost steals the air from my lungs.
The thing he keeps saying like it explains everything.
As if protection is harmless just because he means it that way.
Like being shielded and being handled do not sometimes feel exactly the same when the person doing it has more power than you do.
“You used me the same way he did.”
The room goes completely still.
I see my words impact him in real time. Marcus actually takes half a step back, and a cruel part of me is glad. Another part hates that I hurt him.
“That’s not fair,” he says carefully.
“No?” My throat tightens, but I force the words through it. “You decided what risks were acceptable. You decided how far this needed to go. You decided we could control the fallout if we stayed ahead of it.”
“That is not what this was.”
“Then what was it?”
Marcus opens his mouth and then closes it.
For once, there isn’t a clean answer waiting for him.
And maybe that is the cruelest part of all, because somewhere along the way, this stopped being entirely strategic for him too.
I know that now. I saw it on the rooftop.
I felt it in the greenroom. I heard it in the way he said my name when he thought I might actually let him touch me.
Somehow, that betrayal feels worse than if he had never cared at all. Because if he never cared, this would be simple. If he never cared, he would only be another powerful man using my credibility until it became inconvenient.
But Marcus cares. I believe that now. And apparently, even that wasn’t enough to keep me safe.
“You should go,” I say.
“Sloane.”
“I mean it.”
His gaze holds mine for a long second, and I can see the anger in him now, sharper than before. Still not aimed at me. At the leak. At the person who twisted those emails. And the fact that he cannot force this back under control, no matter how badly he wants to.
Underneath the anger is hurt. I cannot deal with that right now. If I look at it too closely, I might soften, and softening is how I ended up here the first time.
Marcus exhales slowly. “We are going to fight this.”
“No,” I say. “You are.”
His expression tightens. I keep going before I can lose the nerve.
“Because when this finishes destroying someone publicly, it’s not going to be you.”
The truth is impossible to argue with, and for a moment neither of us says anything.
Marcus looks like he wants to argue. Like every instinct in him is straining toward denial, toward correction, toward some version of control he can still offer me.
Instead, he says quietly, “You know I would never intentionally hurt you.”
The sincerity in his voice almost breaks something in me, which is exactly why I can’t let it matter.
“That’s the problem,” I say. “I think you actually believe that.”
Marcus goes completely still. I see the moment he understands what I mean. Caring about someone does not automatically make them safe.
My chest feels tight enough to crack open, so I look away first.
“You should go,” I repeat.
This time, Marcus doesn’t argue. That hurts too.
He stands there for another second, like leaving is its own kind of failure, then gives one small nod and turns toward the door. When he reaches it, he stops with his hand on the handle.
“Sloane.”
I don’t answer.
His voice lowers. “I never used you.”
The words linger longer than they should, and part of me hates how much I want to believe them.
The door closes behind him before I can.