12. The Price of Being Seen
Chapter twelve
The Price of Being Seen
Sienna POV
Delia is waiting in the suite when we get back from the hallway.
She's standing by the window with her arms crossed and her tablet in one hand and the particular stillness of a woman who has been rehearsing this conversation for the last seven minutes. Her assistant hovers near the door like he's not sure if he's allowed to leave.
I walk in. I don't apologize.
Atticus comes in behind me and says nothing. He sets his key card on the counter and leans against the wall with his arms loose at his sides. Not defensive, not distant. Just present. Watching.
"Do you understand," Delia starts, voice flat, "what you handed them tonight?"
"A story that isn't a lie," I say.
"A story that connects you directly to the hazing incident. Which means you are now a material witness. Which means their lawyers can depose you. Which means—"
"I was there. That's not new information."
"It is when you're the one confirming it on camera in a hotel hallway at midnight while a dozen photographers are shooting from four feet away." She sets the tablet down on the coffee table. Turns it to face me.
The clip is already everywhere.
I look at myself on the screen. Chin up. Voice clear. Someone had to stop it.
I look exactly like a woman who means what she says.
I'd do it again.
"Sienna." Delia's voice drops the professional edge for half a second.
Just enough to show the real frustration underneath.
"I understand the instinct. I do. But you are not a player.
You are not management. You are here because your presence makes this story softer, and every time you speak without a script you remind people that you have opinions and history and a past they haven't finished digging through yet. "
The room goes quiet.
I feel Atticus shift against the wall.
"She answered a slur," he says. His voice is even. Quiet. The kind of quiet that has weight. "Someone called her a gold digger in a public hallway. She responded. That's not a crisis. That's a person.""
Delia looks at him.
He looks back.
She recalculates something behind her eyes and closes her tablet.
"We'll manage it," she says, which is as close to backing down as Delia Vance gets. She picks up her bag. Looks at me one more time. Not unfriendly. Just measured. "Try to sleep. The sponsor dinner is at seven."
The door clicks shut behind her.
I stand in the middle of the suite and breathe.
Atticus doesn't move for a moment. Then he pushes off the wall and crosses to the kitchen, opens the small fridge, and pulls out two bottles of water. He sets one on the counter beside me without a word.
I pick it up. I don't drink it.
"You should've let me take that," he says. Low. Easy. Like he's commenting on the weather.
"Which part?"
"The hallway. The photographer. The gold digger comment." He unscrews his own bottle. "You didn't have to answer."
"I wanted to."
He nods like that's the answer he expected. "I know."
There's something unbearably simple about the way he says it. No lecture, no strategy, no here's what you should have done instead. Just I know. Like her wanting something is enough. Like it doesn't need to be weighed against the consequences to earn acknowledgment.
I pick up my water bottle and take a long drink and tell myself it's nothing. I'm not convincing.
"What do you need?" he asks.
I look at him. "What?"
"Tonight. What do you need." He's watching me with that calibrated attention he always has. Not intrusive. Just there. Present in a way most people aren't. "Not for the arrangement. For you."
The question lands somewhere unguarded.
I've been answering the arrangement version of every question for days now. What does Sienna Hart, PR girlfriend, need? She needs the right dress and the right answers and the right amount of warmth on camera. She needs to hit her marks and not freelance in hotel hallways.
What do I need?
I look away first. "Sleep," I say. "I need sleep."
He doesn't push. He just nods again and takes his water to his bedroom and closes the door, and I stand in the kitchen holding my bottle and thinking about the way he asked like the answer actually mattered.
The sponsor dinner is at the kind of restaurant that doesn't list prices on the menu and expects you to already know why. White tablecloths. Candles that flicker on purpose. The kind of quiet where everyone is performing calm and nobody is actually calm.
I'm in the black dress Delia selected. It's a good dress. I hate that it's a good dress.
Atticus is in a dark suit and he looks the way he always looks, like he arrived somewhere slightly before everyone else and has already assessed every exit. The candlelight cuts across his face and makes him look like something carved out of bad decisions. He holds a drink he doesn't sip.
I stay close because we're supposed to. Because optics. Because that's the arrangement.
But he keeps doing things that aren't in the arrangement.
He angles his body toward mine when the team's lead sponsor starts talking at length about Q4 revenue projections.
His shoulder a few inches from mine. Not touching.
Just blocking. Creating a small pocket of space between me and the table's ambient noise.
A small pocket of quiet that I step into without meaning to.
When a woman across the table asks how we met, Atticus glances at me before he answers. Like he's checking what I want him to say. Like my preference matters more than the script.
I give him the smallest nod.
He tells a version of the truth. The bar, the years of knowing each other sideways, the slow collision of two people who didn't plan it. Nothing that's technically a lie. Everything that sounds like one anyway.
I laugh at the right moments. I answer questions with enough warmth to read as genuine and enough deflection to stay private. I've been performing in rooms like this my whole adult life. The bar taught me how to be exactly what a room needed without losing any part of myself.
I'm losing parts of myself.
Not to the room. To the man beside me.
Every time he tilts his head to hear me over the noise, every time his hand grazes the small of my back to steer me through a gap between chairs, every time he looks at me in the middle of someone else's sentence like he's checking in, I lose a little more of the careful distance I've been maintaining.
The worst part is that he's not doing it for the cameras.
I know what his performance looks like. I've watched it for days. The calculated warmth, the practiced ease, the version of Atticus Knox that Delia built for public consumption.
This isn't that.
This is something quieter.
More dangerous.
By the third hour I've scanned every door in the restaurant twice and I'm nursing a glass of wine I don't really want and making conversation with the team's equipment sponsor about something I won't remember tomorrow.
Atticus has been drawn into a conversation at the far end of the table. Grant Calder and two men I recognize as league representatives. His face is a wall. His posture is a wall. Nothing moves in him that isn't deliberate.
But his eyes find mine across the table every few minutes.
Not checking the performance. Just... checking on me.
I look away the third time it happens because I can't keep catching his eye across a dinner table and pretending it's nothing. Because it's been two weeks and he's never once made me feel like collateral. And I built my entire adult life on the certainty that men like him always do.
A waiter glides past with a bread basket, smooth and soundless, already gone before I register he was there.
I feel it before I see it. A fold of paper slipped beneath my fingers, tucked under my water glass.
I don't react.
I wait until the waiter has moved on. Until the equipment sponsor is laughing at his own story. Until Atticus is looking at Grant Calder instead of me.
I unfold it under the table.
Meet me outside. Come alone. —Dad
The paper is cream-colored. The handwriting is neat.
I know that handwriting.
I grew up watching it sign things. Checks, documents, promises he had no intention of keeping. I know the careful slant of it, the practiced evenness, the penmanship of a man who always wanted to look like someone worth trusting.
My wine glass is still in my other hand.
I set it down without sound.
The table carries on around me. Laughter, deal talk, the ambient noise of money in a room where it's comfortable. Nobody noticed. Nobody sees the note.
Nobody except the man at the far end of the table who has just gone completely, unnaturally still.
I don't look at Atticus.
But I feel him the way you feel a shift in temperature. The way the air in a room changes before a storm decides to be a storm.
He saw.