Chapter 14 The Crown
The Crown
“When he shows the world who he’s become”
SLOANE
The finale set looked like a wedding and a funeral had a baby and given it a production budget.
Twelve hundred seats arranged in a horseshoe around a stage rebuilt overnight — white columns draped in blush silk, enough fresh peonies to bankrupt a small florist. And lighting so perfectly measured that every contestant would look like a cologne ad and I would look like a woman in complete control of a situation that had detonated spectacularly twenty hours ago.
The throne sat center stage, reupholstered in fabric that caught the light like liquid gold, flanked by cameras on motorized rigs that could track a flinch from forty feet.
The trending hashtags were already cycling — #GoodBoyFinale, #RhysloaneScandal, #QueenSloane — and in the production trailer, a social media coordinator was mainlining espresso and praying to whatever god oversees engagement metrics.
I was backstage in a champagne gown that weighed approximately eleven pounds and required a physics degree to zip, touching up lipstick that was already flawless because my hands wanted an assignment.
The crown sat on my head, and every time I caught my reflection in the makeup mirrors I saw a woman who looked exactly like the Queen of a hit dating show.
Composed, luminous, camera-ready — a million miles from the woman who’d stood in a fluorescent hallway last night watching a man walk away while her lipstick was still on his collar.
“Ratings are through the roof.” Tessa appeared beside me with her tablet, headset slightly crooked, vibrating with the focused energy of someone running a live broadcast on four hours of sleep and sheer spite.
“The scandal tripled our audience. Every entertainment outlet in the country is covering the finale. We’re simulcasting on three platforms.” She paused, studying my face with the fluency of two decades of friendship.
“You look like you’re about to perform open-heart surgery on yourself. ”
“I’m fine.”
“You said fine. You never say fine when you’re actually fine.
You say great or handling it or I’ve developed a sophisticated coping mechanism involving true crime podcasts and denial.
” She set the tablet down and gripped both my shoulders, pivoting me to face her.
“Your mascara is pristine but your cuticles are destroyed. You’ve been picking at them since four AM, haven’t you. ”
It wasn’t a question. Tessa had known me since we were eighteen-year-old freshmen bonding over a shared hatred of our RA and a shared obsession with early Scandal — she could read my stress levels from my nail beds alone. “Is he here?”
That was the question. The one I’d been circling since four AM, alone in the Queen’s Suite with my phone face-down on the nightstand because looking at it meant either seeing a message from him or seeing nothing from him, and I couldn’t decide which would be worse.
He’d said I need to think. He’d walked away.
Twenty hours of silence — the longest we’d gone without some form of contact since Week Two, when he’d started leaving his coffee cup next to mine in the kitchen every morning like a territorial claim disguised as a caffeine habit.
“I don’t know,” I told Tessa. “I don’t know if he’s here.”
A complicated expression crossed Tessa’s features — the producer calculating angles, the best friend calculating damage, and underneath both, a flicker I’d noticed more and more this season, a wistful hunger that surfaced whenever she watched someone else’s love story from behind the cameras.
She blinked it away before I could name it.
“Okay. Regardless. You walk out there, you sit on that throne, you do what you’ve done brilliantly for ten weeks.
You’re the Queen. Act like it.” She squeezed my shoulders once, hard. “Sixty seconds.”
I smoothed the gown. Adjusted the crown.
Pushed my tongue against the roof of my mouth — a trick a therapist had taught me for stopping tears, which I had deployed more times this season than in the previous twenty-eight years of my life combined.
The stage lights hit me as I walked out, and forty million people saw a queen — spine straight, crown catching every spotlight, a woman who belonged on a throne.
Underneath: the real woman, counting her heartbeats and scanning the wings for a man who might or might not have decided she was worth the risk.
Julian went first.
He’d always been the frontrunner on paper — beautiful, articulate, so emotionally intelligent it came with talking points and a skincare routine.
His speech was immaculate, delivered with smooth confidence, every word tuned to what women wanted to hear, and that flawlessness had always left me reaching for a feeling that kept slipping through my fingers.
Like gripping fog. Like talking to the most gorgeous chatbot ever coded.
“Sloane,” he said, and his voice carried beautifully across the hushed studio, every word placed with care. “This experience has taught me what it means to show up. You deserved every ounce of my attention, and I hope I gave you at least some of it.”
The audience murmured their approval. Somewhere in the front row, a woman dabbed her eyes. Julian was perfect, and I needed a messier truth, and we both knew it.
He paused. His gaze flickered — a micro-adjustment, near-imperceptible, the first unscripted thing I’d seen him do in ten weeks.
“I came here looking for something I’d lost,” he said, quieter now, the polish dimming.
“And I found it. Somewhere else. With someone else.” His eyes met mine, and for one brief, startling second, Julian looked like a man with an actual wound — old, deep, carefully concealed beneath all that grooming.
“You deserve someone who sees you how he sees you. I tried. I wanted to.” A ghost of a smile.
“You’re extraordinary, Sloane. And the right person already knows that. ”
He stepped back. Graceful, contained, an exit that would make readers love him in four books. I felt my throat close — guilt and gratitude and relief braiding together — and mouthed thank you because my voice wouldn’t cooperate with anything louder.
In my peripheral vision, I registered Tessa behind Camera Three. Her clipboard was lowered, forgotten, and she was watching Julian with an expression I couldn’t place — the look of a woman who’d sworn off fairy tales catching herself mid-wish.
The applause for Julian faded into the hum of twelve hundred people waiting for the only moment that mattered. My body was on autopilot — nodding, smiling, the muscle memory of forty hours of live television — while every nerve ending I possessed trained itself on the wings, waiting.
Mason, seated in the front row of the audience section reserved for eliminated contestants, caught my eye and gave me a thumbs-up so earnest and encouraging that I laughed.
He was wearing a blazer over what appeared to be a vintage Ted Lasso t-shirt — because of course he was, because Mason Rivera had never met a wholesome reference he didn’t want to embody.
And he radiated the particular brightness of a person determined to be happy for someone else even if it cost him in ways he hadn’t figured out yet.
He’d texted me at midnight: you’re going to be amazing tomorrow.
also I made banana bread and left it in the kitchen because that’s my love language and I refuse to apologize for it.
I’d eaten two slices at one AM and cried into both of them.
The pause stretched. Applause. My knuckles were white against the armrests.
Tessa’s voice in my earpiece, barely a whisper: “He’s here.”
RHYS
The backstage corridor smelled like hairspray and flop sweat and approximately four hundred dollars’ worth of peonies, and I was standing in it wearing my own clothes.
The wardrobe team had laid out a charcoal three-piece suit with a pocket square.
I’d looked at it for about ten seconds before putting on the shirt I’d brought from home — dark blue, no tie, sleeves I could roll up.
My father would have called it disrespectful.
My brother would have called it a power move.
I was calling it the only honest thing I could think to do: walk out in front of a live audience dressed as myself, because the alternative was performing, and I’d spent ten weeks learning that the performance was the lie.
Through the curtain gap, I could see the set. I could see her.
She was sitting on that ridiculous throne in a gown the color of champagne, crown catching every light in the studio, spine straight, chin lifted, holding herself together with professionalism and willpower and control that breaks cleanly when it finally goes.
Stunning. Armored. Exactly how I’d felt at two AM before I called Declan — convinced that the safest version of yourself was the one that kept everyone at a distance.
I had a list in my pocket. I’d written it at dawn on my phone and then, because the gesture needed to be physical, copied it onto a piece of paper in handwriting that was steady for the first three items and progressively less steady after that.
Every detail I’d memorized. Every moment I’d catalogued.
The evidence, arranged in order, that Sloane Mitchell was the most extraordinary person I’d ever met and I was the idiot who’d walked away from her in a hallway.
The stage manager touched my shoulder. “You’re up, Mr. Callahan.”
I walked out.