16. Tristan
— ? —
Tristan
We stay longer.
We don’t really decide it so much as fail, gloriously and repeatedly, to leave.
One morning I mumble a half-hearted line about heading back before the roads get busy, and Lily looks at me over the rim of her coffee mug, still wearing my old flannel with her hair a mess and my heart in her hands, and says, “Or we could not,” and that’s the entire negotiation.
In the end, we do stay.
The world can wait at the bottom of the mountain a while longer.
It’s waited this long.
And these are, without exaggeration, the best two days of my life.
I keep waiting for it to feel fragile, for the other shoe, for her to remember all the reasons she has to keep me at arm’s length.
It doesn’t come. Somewhere on that firelit rug the wall between us came down, and what’s left is just, us. Easier than it’s been in years.
Easier, maybe, than it ever was, back when we were young and stupid and I still thought love was a thing you announced instead of a thing you did.
I don’t waste a second of it. That’s the promise I made myself in the dark. Every hour she’s giving me, I’m going to be here for it, all the way, with both hands.
So I show her my whole life.
The real one, the one that lives up here in these mountains, the one I stopped visiting when I got too important to remember where I came from.
First, I take her up the ridge trail I’ve been walking since before I could tie my own boots, my dad three steps ahead of me the whole way, telling me to keep up, to watch my footing, to hush and listen for the hawks.
Then I show her the exact bend in the creek where I caught my first fish, a trout barely bigger than my hand, and how I cried when my dad made me throw it back and then cried harder from pride when he told me I was a natural.
I also show her the tree I fell out of and broke my arm, the flat rock where I wrote my first terrible songs, the spot where you can see three states on a clear day.
“You never told me any of this,” she says. We’re sitting on that flat rock, her tucked into my side, the whole green world dropping away beneath us. “Two years married and dating before that, I never knew you broke your arm out of a tree.”
“I know.” And it lands in my chest, the weight of it, all the small ordinary pieces of myself I never bothered to hand her.
“I gave you the whole shiny package and none of the actual, you know. Me. The stupid kid who cried over a fish. I was so busy being Tristan Everett for the world that I never just… sat still and let you have the rest of it.”
She’s quiet for a second, her cheek against my shoulder.
“I would have liked the stupid kid who cried over a fish,” she says softly. “I think I would have liked him a lot.”
“He would have been a goner for you.” I press a kiss to the top of her head. “Absolute goner. First smart-mouthed thing out of your mouth, done for. No hope.”
She laughs, and it rolls out warm across the mountain, and I feel it settle somewhere deep in me, and I think, this… This is the thing.
This is what I almost threw away for a stadium.
Somewhere in it, without either of us saying so, I feel it happen. I feel her forgive me. Not out loud, not in a single grand moment, but in the way she leans into me, in the way she laughs, in the way she stops flinching when I reach for her hand.
It’s not a door swinging open. It’s slower than that, and truer. It’s a thaw. It’s spring coming back to a place that spent a long winter frozen.
I don’t say anything about it. I’ve learned that much, finally.
Some things you don’t announce. You just show up for them, quietly, and let them be real.
By the time the second evening comes, we’ve collapsed together on the big couch in front of the windows, the sun going down gold and pink over the ridgeline, and I am about as happy as a person is allowed to get.
I’ve got my head on her chest, which is upside down and undignified and I do not care even slightly, and she’s got one hand carding slowly through my hair, and I’m listening to her heartbeat.
Half dozing and thinking that I would sign away every award I’ve ever won to keep exactly this, this exact minute, forever.
“You’re squashing me,” she informs me, without any real complaint.
“I’m cozy,” I correct her, nuzzling in further, and she snorts and doesn’t push me off.
Then she shifts a little, and I hear the small sound of her picking up her phone off the side table, the screen brightening the dim room, and I feel her go still under me the way you do when you’re steeling yourself for a thing you’d rather not face.
“You don’t have to look at that, you know,” I murmur into her sweater. “The world can keep spinning without your supervision for one more night.”
“I know.” But her thumb’s already moving. “I just want to check one thing. Danica’s been texting me screenshots all day, she says I need to see the fallout, and if I don’t look she’ll just keep escalating until she drives up here herself.”
She huffs a small laugh. “Which she absolutely would.”
“Fair point. Your cousin is a force of nature.”
“She really is.” Her thumb scrolls, and the light shifts on her face above me, and I tip my head back against her chest to watch her read. Content and warm and utterly unprepared, both of us, for what she’s about to open.
“Okay,” Lily says, scrolling. “Wow… Okay. Danica was not exaggerating.”
“What is it?” I tip my head back to look up at her face, still sprawled across her chest like a large contented cat.
“The gala.” She turns the phone so I can see, angling it down at me. “It went viral. But not the way I was afraid it would.” Her mouth is curving into a look almost gleeful. “It went viral against Hallie.”
I twist around to get a proper look, and watch it.
Clip after clip, the same twelve seconds from a dozen different angles, all of them somebody’s phone footage of Hallie’s arm whipping out and the wine arcing across the space and Lily standing there not flinching, calm as a lake, delivering the tackiness line with an eyebrow raised.
“Oh, that’s a good angle,” I say. “That’s a really good angle. You look incredible and she looks like a woman having a breakdown at a charity function.”
“That’s because that’s exactly what happened.
” Lily scrolls, and reads bits aloud, laughing under her breath.
“This one says, ‘not her throwing a drink because she got called out, the secondhand embarrassment is unreal.’ Oh, and, ‘Liliana Everett standing there like a marble statue while this woman melts down, iconic behavior.’” She snorts.
“There’s a whole thread analyzing my eyebrow. ”
“Your eyebrow deserves the analysis.” I grin up at her. “It ended a woman’s entire social standing in one move. That eyebrow has more range than most actors.”
She swats me lightly with her free hand, but she’s smiling, really smiling, and then it fades a little into a more thoughtful quiet.
“I keep waiting to feel bad about it,” she admits. “Watching her get torn apart out there. She was my friend for a long time, Tristan. At least I thought she was.”
Then she shakes her head slowly. “But I don’t. After everything she did, after finding out who she actually is underneath all of it, I sit here and I watch the whole internet turn on her and I feel, honestly? Nothing. Not one drop of guilt.”
“Good,” I say, and I mean it. “She spent years earning that. You don’t owe her your guilt on top of everything else she took.”
“No.” Lily settles back, satisfied. “No, I don’t.”
The phone buzzes in her hand, a new message sliding down from the top of the screen, and she goes quiet.
“Huh,” she says. “It’s my mother.”
“Uh oh.” I prop my chin on her sternum so I can watch her face. “Should I be running for the hills? Is she coming to finish what the gala started?”
“Hush.” She opens the thread, and I feel her chest rise and fall under my chin as she reads. “Okay, she starts with, and I quote, ‘Before you get mad that I intervened, this is not me trying to control you again.’”
I can’t help it. My eyebrows shoot up.
“Wow,” I say. “Look at that. Aurelia Astor opening a text by preemptively defending her own boundaries.” I grin. “You finally had the talk with your mother about respecting your limits?”
Lily’s mouth curls, smug and pleased with herself. “Well. I’ve been braver lately.”
“You have.”
I say it soft, proud, and I mean that too, more than she probably knows.
The woman reading her phone above me is not the same woman who walked out of that penthouse weeks ago, and I’ve had a front-row seat to every inch of the change, and it takes my breath a little, watching her come into herself.
“You really have.”
Lily bumps her chin against the top of my head, embarrassed and pleased, and keeps reading.
“She says, okay, ‘I could not simply sit by after that woman assaulted you in my home, in front of my guests. So I had her followed.’” Lily blinks. “She had her followed? My mother had Hallie followed. Who is this woman and what has she done with Aurelia?”
“I’m genuinely a little scared of her,” I admit. “In an admiring way.”
“You should be.” She keeps scrolling. “There’s a typing bubble, hang on, she’s sending a photo…”
A photo starts loading at the top of the thread, resolving from a gray blur into focus one band at a time, and Lily’s mother’s next message drops in underneath it.
[ Isn’t this your husband’s manager?]
The picture sharpens.
It’s a long-lens shot, grainy, taken through the window of some restaurant or bar. Two people at a corner table, heads bent together, talking close.
One of them is Hallie, unmistakable even in profile, that golden hair, that particular tilt of her head. And across from her, leaning in, one hand flat on the table, is a face I have known for the better part of a decade.
That bastard.
Ford.
Between them on the table, half tucked under Hallie’s hand, is a plain manila envelope. And beside it, catching a slice of light, a small black USB drive.
Everything in me goes still.
“That’s Ford,” Lily says slowly, sitting up a little, which dislodges me from her chest entirely, and I let her, because I’m already sitting up too, staring at that screen. “That’s… Tristan, why is your manager having a secret meeting with Hallie?”
It lands on me all at once, the whole ugly shape of it clicking together, every loose piece I’d been carrying around locking into a single picture.
“Ex-manager,” I say, and my voice has gone quiet and hard. “And they weren’t just meeting. Lily.” I take the phone from her, staring at the envelope, the drive, the two of them with their heads together like conspirators, because that is exactly what they are.
“The leak. At the concert. It was never a mix-up. It was never the label getting cold feet at the last second. They planned it.”
“What?”
“Think about it.”
The pieces are coming faster now, and each one lands like a blow.
“The song that got played instead of mine. First Light. The one that made me look like I was pining for her… for Hallie. Somebody made sure it was cued up and ready. And Ford, right before I fired him, he said… he said there were pieces already in motion, that he was three steps ahead of me, and I was too wrecked to hear it.”
I look up at her, sick with it. “He was working with her. The whole time. She wanted me, or wanted to be attached to me, and he wanted a scandal to sell, and the two of them figured out they could get both by blowing up my marriage on the biggest stage in the world.”
Lily has gone pale, her eyes locked on the photo. “They did this to us on purpose.”
“They screwed us.” The words come out flat and certain. “Both of us. Deliberately. For a headline and a shot at, at whatever she thought she was going to get.”
My hand tightens around the phone. “It was a plan, Lily.”
For a long moment neither of us says anything.
The sun’s dropped behind the ridge now and the room’s gone blue-gray with dusk, and I sit there holding that photo and feeling a cold, clarifying calm settle into my chest, right where all the guilt used to live.
Because here’s the thing. I still did what I did. Nobody put my hands on the strings that night, and I’ll carry that. But this, this is different. This was done to us, on purpose, by people who smiled in our faces while they did it.
Lily takes a slow breath beside me, and when I look over at her, the shock on her face has hardened into a look I recognize, because it’s the same thing turning to iron in my own chest.
“We can’t let them get away with this,” she says quietly.
“No.” I set the phone down. “No, we can’t.”
“Not to make it about revenge.” She turns to face me, and there’s steel in her now, clear-eyed and certain.
“But people are still out there believing I cheated. Believing you’re some heartbroken artist pining for his lost love.
They took the truth and they sold a lie in its place, and they’re still profiting off it right now, tonight. ”
Her jaw sets. “I’m done letting them write our story. I want the real one out there. All of it.”
“Then we put it out there.” I reach over and take her hand, and lace our fingers together, and hold on. “Together. The truth, all of it, on our terms. No more hiding, no more damage control, no more letting them set the narrative.”
I squeeze her hand. “We go home, and we end this.”
“Home,” she repeats, and a change moves through her face at the word, softening even through the resolve. “Not running away this time.”
“No.”
It’s true, I realize, saying it.
A fundamental gravity has changed in the last two days. We’re not fleeing the world anymore, hiding up a mountain hoping it forgets us. We’re going back down to meet it, side by side, ready.
“Not running. Coming home.”
Lily looks down at our joined hands, then back up at me, and she nods, once. There’s a whole future in it.
We start packing that night.
This time, I’m not afraid of what’s waiting at the bottom of the mountain.
Because whatever it is, this time, we’re walking into it together.