Chapter Thirteen Damage Control
Cherise never posted an apology, but she did quietly stop showing up to Amir’s events after Nina made two phone calls Mika never asked the details of.
The internet moved on to a new scandal within a week, the way it always does, but the comments didn’t disappear — they just went underground, waiting in Mika’s search history for the nights she couldn’t sleep.
She started therapy that spring, something she’d never had the money or the language for before, paid for out of a stipend Amir quietly set up through Nina so it wouldn’t feel like his money buying her healing.
In one session she said out loud, for the first time, the sentence that had been living under her ribs since she was twelve years old watching a stranger carry her family’s couch to the curb: I don’t think I’m allowed to take up space.
Her therapist asked her where that came from.
“My whole life people have taken things from me or left,” Mika said.
“My dad left. My mom needed me to be small so she didn’t have to feel guilty about what she couldn’t give me.
My friends only wanted me around for what I could do for them.
I think I learned that being quiet, being easy, being no trouble — that was the price of being kept. ”
“And Amir?”
“Amir’s never once asked me to be smaller.” Saying it out loud, she realized how true it was, how different that made him from every single relationship that came before. “But I keep waiting for him to. Because that’s the pattern. That’s what I know.”
It was slow work, unlearning that. But she did it — in a small office above a laundromat in Brooklyn, twice a month, with a man who had turned a corner sitting patiently outside in his truck those nights, never once making her rush.
Amir did his own version of the work, quieter, less named.
He started bringing Mika into decisions he used to make alone — which events to accept, which press to sit for, whether a given sponsor’s team could be trusted around her.
He fired a publicist who suggested, once, that “a more camera-friendly girlfriend” might help his crossover appeal, didn’t even finish hearing the pitch before he was standing up from the table.
He never told Mika about that meeting. Nina told her, months later, half as gossip and half as proof: he shut that down before you even knew it was a conversation.
It didn’t erase the internet, and it didn’t erase Cherise’s eleven seconds, which still surfaced sometimes in some stranger’s meme or some slow-news-day recap.
But it built something underneath the noise that hadn’t been there before — a version of Amir who checked, now, before he assumed she was fine, and a version of Mika who was starting, slowly, to believe she was allowed to say when she wasn’t.