Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Evan
I stood outside Nico’s house and tried to remember how to breathe. I rang the doorbell.
Nico opened it almost immediately, like he’d been waiting on the other side.
We stood there, taking each other in.
I could see the toll of the past four days in the dark circles under his eyes, the way he held his shoulders tight. His torn jeans and faded Lasers T-shirt looked like what he wore when he needed something familiar and comforting. He was barefoot, hair still damp from a shower.
“Hey.” His voice was quiet, hesitant. He stepped forward, pulled me into a hug, and I could breathe again.
His arms wrapped around me tight and certain, the way they always did. His chin rested on top of my head. The steady rhythm of his breath wafted against my hair. This still made sense.
“I missed you,” he said quietly.
“I missed you too.”
We stood there in his doorway for a long moment before he pulled back.
“Come in.”
The house looked like the past days had been as rough for him as they’d been for me—dishes in the sink, empty water bottles on the coffee table, a sweatshirt crumpled on the back of a chair.
We sat on opposite ends of his couch.
“I’m sorry I pulled away,” Nico said. “After Saturday. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I’m sorry I kept saying I don’t know,” I said. “That wasn’t fair to you.”
“It wasn’t fair to either of us.”
“I hate this.” My shoulders slumped. “I hate that we’re sitting here like strangers when three weeks ago everything felt easy.”
“It wasn’t easy three weeks ago either. We just didn’t know it yet.”
He wasn’t wrong.
“I love you,” he said. “But I need more than I don’t know. I need to know you’re choosing this.”
“I need to figure out if I can actually do it,” I said. “Not try to do it. Not hope it gets easier. Actually do it.”
“Yeah. You do.”
Then Nico shifted closer on the couch. Put his arm around me. And I let myself lean into him because even now, even after everything we’d just said, this was the only place I wanted to be.
That was the cruelest part. I loved him. I didn’t want to lose him. But loving him didn’t make me brave enough to stay.
And I didn’t know how to fix that.
“What are you thinking?” he asked quietly.
“That I don’t want to lose this.”
“Me neither.”
I turned to look at him. “So we both do the work. Separately. And then we figure out if it’s enough.”
“Yeah.”
It wasn’t romantic or a grand declaration. Just honest.
He leaned down and kissed me. Soft at first, tentative, like we were both testing whether it still felt right.
It did.
I kissed him back, and for a minute, everything else fell away.
Just this. Just us.
When we pulled apart, we stayed close. Foreheads touching, breathing the same air.
“I should go,” I said eventually.
“You could stay.”
I wanted to. Wanted to fall into his bed and his arms and pretend everything was fixed.
But it wasn’t fixed. And pretending wouldn’t help.
“Not tonight. We both need to do this part alone.”
We stood up, and he walked me to the door. He kissed me again before I left… longer this time, like he was trying to memorize it.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you too.”
I walked to my car, feeling lighter than I had in days. Not because anything was solved, but because for the first time in three weeks, we’d been honest with each other. No deflecting. No trying to fix it with solutions that didn’t work.
Just the truth.
And maybe that was enough to build on.
Thursday morning, I woke up anxious.
The video call with Wesley was at ten. I’d spent the night going over what I wanted to say, what questions to ask, how to explain what I’d been going through without sounding like I was falling apart.
At nine fifty, I retrieved a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge, opened the app on my laptop, and waited.
At exactly ten, Wesley’s face appeared on the screen.
He was older than I expected—maybe late thirties—dark hair, a friendly smile, sitting in what looked like his office at headquarters with the Stormhawks’ team logo visible on the wall behind him.
“Evan. Good to meet you.” His voice was warm but professional. “How are you doing?”
“Honestly? Not great.”
“Fair enough. You’ve been having a rough few weeks.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
He looked at me for a moment without rushing to fill the silence. “You weren’t sure about calling me.”
It wasn’t a question. “No. I wasn’t.”
“That’s okay.” He leaned back slightly. “Can I ask why you changed your mind?”
“I ran out of strategies that were working.”
“Okay. Walk me through what’s been happening.” He picked up a pen.
I took a breath. “The feeling that I can’t go anywhere without someone recognizing me or taking a photo.
The articles. Having my routine documented by a gossip site—where I live, what time I leave, what I order at the coffee shop…
” I paused. “I’m a pretty private person, and I don’t have any privacy left. ”
“Right. So, the exposure is unmanaged. That’s actually something we can work with.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me.”
“First… cameras.” He leaned forward on his elbows.
“You can’t stop people from taking photos.
But you can make yourself boring. Don’t react, don’t run, don’t engage.
Just go about your day. If you react, that’s the shot they want—the flinch, the hand over the face, the person clearly rattled.
If you’re just a guy buying groceries, that’s not interesting after the first week. ”
“What if they follow me? Or wait outside my building?”
“You establish a pattern that doesn’t give them anything useful.
And if someone gets aggressive—physically blocking you, making you feel unsafe—you document it, you call the police, and you tell me.
But most of the time? They want the reaction.
Don’t give it to them and they’ll move on to something else. ”
I wrote that down. It was concrete in a way I could actually use.
“Social media,” I said. “The comments. The monitoring.”
He looked at me directly. “Stop.”
“I can’t just—”
“Yes, you can.” No hedge in his voice. “I know it feels like information. Like if you know what they’re saying, you can prepare for it. But you’re not preparing, you’re just absorbing it. And it’s making everything worse.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Here’s what actually helps,” he said. “You designate one person to monitor for anything you genuinely need to know about.”
“My friend Danny.”
He nodded. “A specific threat, a piece of misinformation that’s spreading and needs correcting. He flags it if it matters. Everything else, you don’t see.”
“What about Google Alerts? I set one up for my name.”
“Turn it off today.”
“That feels like not knowing what’s coming.”
“I understand why it feels that way. But what you’re actually doing is reading things you can’t change, written by people who don’t know you, and letting them tell you who you are.” He paused. “That’s not intelligence gathering. That’s just pain.”
That landed in a way I didn’t expect. “Okay,” I said. “What else?”
“You need to decide what you’re willing to share publicly and what you’re not.
Some partners go visible—they post photos, they own the story, they show up at events and lean into it.
Other people keep everything private and just live their lives.
Neither is wrong. But you have to decide, not just drift into one or the other. ”
“I don’t want to post about us online.”
“Then don’t. But that means accepting that other people will.
Paparazzi, fans, anyone who spots you. You can’t control what they put out.
You can only control what you put out yourself.
” He paused. “And that’s actually a useful principle for everything.
Ask yourself what you can control, and focus only on that.
The rest is going to happen regardless.”
“And when someone recognizes me in public? Wants a photo?”
“You say no if you don’t want to or yes if you don’t mind.
But you don’t owe anyone access to you just because you’re dating someone public.
You’re not a public figure. You’re a private person who got caught in someone else’s visibility.
” He said it plainly, without drama. “You’re allowed to just be a person. ”
I sat with that for a moment. I’d been saying it for weeks and it had sounded like an excuse every time. Coming from someone in Nico’s world, it sounded like a fact.
“The other thing,” Wesley continued. “Is maintaining the parts of your life that have nothing to do with any of this. Your own friendships, your own work, your own space where you’re just Evan. Not Nico’s partner, not the guy in the parking lot photos. Just yourself.”
“Danny,” I said again.
“Exactly. Don’t let that go. That’s what keeps you grounded when everything else is loud.”
“What about my business?” I asked. “I’ve lost five clients. My professional reputation is tied to articles about gold digging. I can’t just wait for people to lose interest.”
“No, you can’t. So let’s talk about that.” He shifted forward. “I’ve done my research into your situation. You’ve already started the search result work… updated case studies, professional content, rebuilding what comes up when someone googles you. That’s right. Keep doing it.”
“I sent the first case study to my web designer three weeks ago. I’ve been posting on LinkedIn. I’m working on a bylined piece for a marketing publication.”
“Good. That’s exactly right. Professional visibility and personal visibility are different things.
Posting marketing insights establishes expertise.
Posting about your relationship or engaging with gossip feeds the story.
So the line is simple: professional content only.
You’re Evan Beckett, marketing consultant.
That’s the only version of you that exists in public. ”
“What about the clients who paused contracts? The ones I haven’t formally lost yet.”
“Have you reached out to them?”