Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
BAILEY
We don’t leave the apartment—two days of being inside where smoke can’t reach.
The fire is still smoking when we close the door, and we don’t leave.
I call Sullivan. Fallon texts the fighters.
Recovery instructions. But physically, we stay inside where the smoke can’t reach us, where the evidence of destruction is abstract rather than visceral.
We stay in a space she’s made feel almost permanent: her apartment, which still has her comforter, her books on the nightstand, the shape of her absence when he leaves.
She sleeps more than I’ve ever seen her sleep.
The gym fire took something out of her that she’s trying to replace with unconsciousness.
I watch her breathe and I think about the expression on her face when we stood in the parking lot watching the building collapse.
Not panic. Just… counting. Like she was measuring the mathematics of destruction and deciding what equation would rebuild it.
The first day blurs into evening: food we don’t eat, lights kept low.
I track time by how the sun moves through the apartment—east to west, the city rotating beneath us.
Fallon sleeps on the couch, sprawled across cushions she normally never sits on because sitting requires stillness.
I lie beside her and I don’t sleep because sleeping would mean surrendering to the timeline, and the timeline is what delivered the fire.
By midnight, the smoke smell has migrated even here. I can taste it on the air. Chemical smoke, the particular tang of things burned that shouldn’t burn.
The call comes at 2:19 AM on the second night.
Brennan.
His voice: smooth, practiced. The voice of someone used to making offers people accept. The voice of a man who has made this call a hundred times before.
“Mr. Morrison. I have a proposal that might interest you and Ms. Haynes both.”
I’m sitting on the couch in Fallon’s dark apartment. She’s asleep in the bedroom. I can see the city lights through the window. Sacramento at night. The city where I found something worth destroying myself for. The city where I’m now sitting at 2:19 AM listening to a man try to buy my silence.
“I’m listening,” I say.
“The investigation is becoming costly,” Brennan continues.
“Federal resources. Regulatory attention. Frankly, it would be better for everyone if this resolved quietly. You and Ms. Haynes could withdraw from the investigation. Issue public statements acknowledging that your previous allegations were based on incomplete information. Miscommunication. The kind of misunderstandings that happen when people are under stress.”
He pauses. Calculated. Testing the silence.
“In exchange, we would drop all pending lawsuits. The federal charges would be suspended. You could continue fighting. Ms. Haynes could continue operating her gymnasium. Everyone walks away. Everyone wins.”
The word “wins” hangs in the dark apartment.
“And what about the evidence?” I ask. “The recordings? The documentation?”
“Never surfaced. Never existed. Part of the resolution is understanding that sometimes what we think we know turns out to be more complicated than we realized. Misinterpretations. Technical issues with the recordings. The usual things that happen when investigations proceed without proper oversight. Storage servers fail. Metadata gets corrupted. These are normal technical problems that any sophisticated system experiences.”
He’s offering me a chance to make the secret disappear. To let him bury everything. To become the kind of person who accepts deals and walks away.
I don’t say anything.
“Think about it,” Brennan says. “You have forty-eight hours. After that, the legal machinery proceeds. And Mr. Morrison? When this goes to court, when people are subpoenaed and sworn testimony occurs, the technical aspects of the case become less important than the credibility of the witnesses. People talk. People remember things. Sometimes contradictory things. I’d hate for your credibility questioned at a critical moment. ”
He hangs up.
I sit in the dark for twenty minutes, listening to the city, listening to Fallon breathe in the next room.
Forty-eight hours to accept surrender. Forty-eight hours to become the kind of person who quits.
Forty-eight hours to rationalize walking away because the evidence is too exposed now, the case is too compromised, the system has won.
I go into the bedroom and wake her up.
She comes awake like she’s still in the fire—alert, assessing, looking for threat. Then she sees it’s me and her body relaxes by maybe five percent. She’s wearing one of my shirts. She always wears one of my shirts to sleep now.
“Brennan,” I say. “Offering deals.”
“For?”
“Withdrawal. Retraction. Public statement that we were mistaken. He’ll drop everything.”
She doesn’t answer immediately. She sits up—still in my shirt—and she looks out the window at the city. Her profile is sharp in the darkness. I can see the scar through her eyebrow that she got at eighteen, that she’s traced with her thumb while explaining how she builds things.
“No,” she says finally.
“You might want to think about?—”
“I already thought about it.” She turns back to face me.
“I thought about it while we were standing in the parking lot and our gym was burning. I thought about it while I was watching the roof collapse. I thought about it while the firefighters were pouring water on everything I’ve built.
And I decided no.” She pauses. The words that come next are going to matter.
“Besides, I have something to tell you.”
My stomach drops because I know what’s coming. The secret. The Ricky Tran fight. Sullivan must have found it in the documentation I thought I’d deleted. The narrative is about to collapse. The person she loves is about to become the person she’s disappointed in.
But that’s not what she says.
“I love you,” Fallon says quietly, in the dark, with the city lights casting shadows across her face.
“I wasn’t supposed to say that. I was supposed to keep that locked down until the crisis ended.
Supposed to maintain measured space until the case was resolved.
But Brennan called with his offer of surrender, and I realized I don’t care about clinical remove anymore.
I don’t care about keeping it separate or secret or safe.
I love you, and I’m not going to ask you to be something you’re not to make this work. ”
I can’t breathe.
“Bailey? Are you?—”
“I love you too,” I say. The words feel like lies and truth simultaneously. I love her. That much is real. And I’m hiding something so massive that the love feels like it’s built on a foundation that’s about to collapse.
She pulls me close and I let her, breathing her in, feeling her heartbeat against mine.
We’ve been together for seven days—if you count the stolen moments, the text messages, the 3 AM moments in his apartment.
Seven days of building something that feels real despite being entirely constructed from secrecy.
And now she’s told me she loves me, and I’m sitting here knowing that I have a deadline: either I tell her about Stockton and Ricky Tran and the three thousand dollars, or she finds out another way.
Either I destroy this moment by admitting I’ve been lying, or I destroy it later when she discovers the lie herself.
“We’re rebuilding the gym,” she says, and her voice carries the relief of someone who’s made a decision. “Rogan found a warehouse. Three thousand square feet in Midtown. Better location. Better bones. We start next week.”
I can hear the relief in her voice. The fire destroyed the old space, which means she gets to build something new. It’s how she thinks—every destruction is an opportunity to build better.
“And then?” I ask.
“And then we fight. You’ve got nine days until the Apex event. Sullivan’s timeline says we’ll have federal support by then. We execute.”
She talks about fighting like she talks about building. Like it’s architecture. Like there’s a blueprint we’ve been following and now we’re finally at the stage where we pour concrete.
“What happens if?—”
“It doesn’t matter what happens if,” Fallon says. “We control what we can control. Your suspension lifts in nine days. You’re fighting. I’m in your corner. Everything else follows from that.”
It’s not true. What happens if my secret comes out. What happens if the documentation surfaces. What happens if the person she loves is not the person she thinks he is. Those are all the things she’s not willing to consider, and I’m not brave enough to make her.
“Okay,” I say. “Nine days.”
We don’t sleep much that night. We talk about the gym—specifications, equipment purchases, the contractor Rogan found.
We talk about the fight—Marcos Villarreal, wrestling heavy, the kind of grinding style that Apex would pick specifically to neutralize my strengths.
We talk about everything except the thing I should be telling her.
By the time the sun comes up, I’ve made a decision: after the fight, I tell her everything. After I win, when I’m not asking her to believe in me while I’m also lying to her, I’ll lay it all out. The guilt, the secret, the documentation I hid. We’ll figure out what it means together.
It’s another rationalization. I’ll probably spend the next nine days rationalizing this choice over and over again.
But right now, I’m just holding her and letting myself believe that I can have this—this love, this moment, this shared purpose—without it collapsing under the weight of what I’m not telling her.
She says it again, quieter this time: “I love you.”
“I love you too,” I say.
And that much, at least, is completely true.