4. Chapter Four #2
“You built months of this with me. The studio nights, the social media clips, the looks you didn’t stop. Then tonight she leaves, and you still want to pretend your marriage isn’t the only thing in the way?”
Alarm cut through his exhaustion. Serena hadn’t been playing with the idea. She’d believed it.
Wendy had asked him what he thought about Serena’s constant filming. She’d asked whether the campaign meant something. He’d called it harmless because admitting the danger would mean admitting Wendy had seen it before he did.
Serena held his gaze. “Say it. If you weren’t married to Wendy, I’d be the woman beside you.”
He heard another scrape beyond the cases, followed by the squeak of wheels in the hall. He didn’t turn toward it. Serena’s demand held all his attention.
“If I weren’t married to Wendy, you’d be the woman beside me…That’s what you want me to say. But it isn’t true.”
Her face changed.
“You’re trying to make me repeat the fantasy Billy sold,” Hunter said. “I should’ve stopped it sooner. I didn’t. That’s on me. But you and I aren’t real.”
“Then what was that song?”
“Wendy’s.”
The word came out hard and clean. The truth felt good for one breath.
“I wrote it about Wendy,” he said. “About our truck, our rain, our life. ‘Twenty Again’ was hers before you ever sang a note.”
Serena stared at him. Hurt sharpened into anger. “Then why did you hand it to me?”
Hunter had no answer that didn’t make him small.
She stepped back. “You never promised me anything. Fine. But you never stopped me from believing it either.”
“I’m stopping it now.”
“Back here,” she said, looking around the bare corridor. “Where no one can see you choose your wife.”
She walked away before he could answer. A door banged somewhere past the equipment cases. When Hunter looked down the corridor, he saw two stagehands pushing a cart, and a woman in a headset checking her phone. Nothing that mattered. Nothing he needed to chase.
Telling Serena the truth had cost him only the fantasy he no longer needed her to believe in private.
Telling Wendy would mean admitting he’d taken a song intended as her anniversary gift and used it to build that fantasy in public.
Once he said that aloud, he couldn’t ask her to tolerate the campaign.
Or sign it himself while pretending he didn’t know what he was choosing.
“Hunter.”
Eli’s voice pulled him out of the memory and back to the boardroom. Too much had happened too fast, in the span of only two or three days. How had it come to this?
The contract still lay under his hand. On the screen, Serena had one palm against Hunter’s chest in a studio photograph. He remembered her anger in the corridor and Wendy’s face in their home.
He didn’t want Serena. He’d never kissed her, never imagined leaving Wendy for her. Those facts formed a clean wall in his mind. On one side, Serena wanted something he wouldn’t give. On another, the campaign was work.
The song belonged to Wendy. His marriage was real.
He could keep each truth in its own place.
He could set stronger rules with Serena, tell Billy to cut Wendy’s reaction footage, and go home once the rollout stopped shaking under his feet.
He could sit next to Wendy, tell her the song had always been hers, and watch the hurt leave her blue eyes. The thought made his chest ache.
“We need the first approvals today,” Billy said. “Delay creates doubt, and doubt becomes cost. Don’t confuse private discomfort with business judgment.”
Eli leaned back in his chair. “That’s a pretty way to say the business needs his wife to hurt quietly.”
“The business needs adults not to create a moral panic around a marketing campaign.”
Hunter opened the folder. The first pages named companies he owned and partners who’d already started spending money.
Venue holds, production deposits, manufacturing windows, sponsor dates.
Billy hadn’t waited for a signature to make the choice expensive.
Hunter had taught him that he wouldn’t stop a train once other people had climbed aboard.
“You moved before approval,” Hunter said.
“We protected the window,” Billy replied. “Nothing’s final until you sign.”
“But if I don’t, I’m the reason every one of these people loses work.”
Billy spread one hand. “You’re the owner. That’s what the job means.”
The answer should’ve angered him. Instead, it reached the weak place Billy had aimed for.
His father had spent years talking about doors other men had closed.
Hunter had built a life where doors stayed open because people needed him to walk through them.
The contracts on the table were proof he wasn’t helpless.
The faces around it proved he wasn’t forgotten.
Wendy’s love should’ve been stronger proof. Once, it had been. But Wendy knew the frightened boy under the empire. These people saw only the man who could turn one song into a massive production. Their belief asked nothing tender from him. It only asked for ink.
The final page held his name above a blank line. His hand hovered over it. The wedding ring caught the hard light from the windows. He thought of going home now. No campaign, no duet release, no Serena on the tour. He could tell Wendy everything while there was still something left to stop.
Then he looked at the numbers again. Necessary. Current. Wanted. He signed.
Relief showed around the table. People reached for phones and folders. Serena’s manager began speaking with one of the lawyers about release timing. The company response began because he’d given the order. Hunter told himself he could control where it went.
Eli waited until the others began leaving. “You know Serena wants this to be real.”
“I handled Serena,” Hunter said.
“In private. Then you signed a contract to sell her hope in public.”
“I’ll set boundaries.” Hunter pushed back his chair. “I need the rollout stable. Then I’ll talk to Wendy without Billy, without cameras, and without ten people waiting for me to blow up their year.”
Eli stood. Disappointment settled into every line of his weathered face.
“Campaign first,” he said. “Marriage later. You keep saying that order like it isn’t the whole problem.”
Hunter didn’t answer.
Outside the boardroom, an assistant handed Billy a schedule thick with new meetings.
Phones were already ringing behind the glass walls.
Hunter checked his own. Wendy’s message remained unanswered.
He put the phone away and walked toward the elevator.
He’d call her when he could give her more than panic.
When he had the right words. When one honest conversation wouldn’t tear apart everything he’d just signed.
As the elevator descended, he remembered the movement behind the equipment cases and the open service door at the Bowl. Anyone might’ve overheard him and Serena. It didn’t matter, he told himself. There’d been nothing incriminating to hear.
He’d rejected Serena. He didn’t think about how little of a sentence a stranger would need to ruin it all.