Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
HARPER
Two days without him feels like withdrawal.
I know because I've watched enough people in the industry go through the real thing to recognize the symptoms. The restlessness. The inability to focus. The way my body keeps orienting toward the door like it's expecting someone who isn't coming.
He's not coming. I told him to go.
Leah calls with updates. Brianna's real name is Brianna Kemp.
The FBI matched her to a man named Darren Vaughn, a former music industry publicist who was fired from Harper West's label two years ago for making inappropriate advances toward female staff.
He wasn't the letter writer. Brianna was his girlfriend, and the letters were a joint operation.
She gathered the intel. He wrote the words.
The photograph of my bedroom window was taken by Brianna on a night she told me she was picking up dry cleaning.
The FBI arrested them both in Grand Junction yesterday. They'd been in a motel for three days, arguing about whether to approach me directly or escalate the threats to extract money.
It was never obsessive love. It was a shakedown. A long, methodical, terrifying shakedown by two people who thought my fear was worth monetizing.
I sit on my bed at the Summit Inn and feel the weight lift and the emptiness rush in to fill the space it leaves.
I'm safe.
The threat is over.
And the man who made me feel safe when nothing else could is sitting on his uncle's porch a hundred yards away because I told him I didn't know if what we had was real.
I know it's real. I knew it when I said it. Fear makes you a liar, and I was terrified. Not of Brianna or Darren or the letters. Of the way Dominic looks at me like I'm a person and not a product. Of the possibility that someone could want me, just me, and that I could lose that too.
Everyone I've trusted has wanted something.
My label wants my voice. My manager wants my compliance.
Brianna wanted my vulnerability. Every relationship I've had in eighteen years of fame has been transactional at its core, and when Dominic couldn't answer what I am to him, I used that silence as proof of what I already believed.
That I'm not worth keeping. Not the real version. Not the woman who eats grilled cheese in small town diners and cries over betrayal and falls asleep in under a minute when someone holds her.
I pick up my phone and call Sophie Blackwood.
"I need advice."
"Is this about the man who's been sitting on Michael's porch looking like someone kicked his dog for two days?"
"He doesn't have a dog."
"Honey, the metaphor stands. What happened?"
I tell her. Not the stalker details, because I’m not ready to share publicly yet, but the rest. The kiss.
The night together. The fear. The way I pushed him away because letting someone in is the most dangerous thing I've ever done, and I've performed in stadiums with pyrotechnics going off six feet from my face.
Sophie is quiet for a moment. Then she says, "My husband didn't talk to me for three days after he realized he was falling for me.
Drove me nuts. I finally walked over to his ranch and told him I wasn't going anywhere, and he could either deal with that or keep being miserable.
He chose to deal with it. We've been dealing with it ever since. "
"What if he doesn't want to deal with it?"
"Harper. The man slept on a floor outside your door for a week. He's dealing with it. He just doesn't know you want him to."
I hang up. Sit on the bed. Look at the door.
Then I stand up, put on shoes, and walk outside.
Summit Falls at dusk is painted in golds and purples. The mountains catch the last light and hold it, and the air smells like pine and someone's barbecue and the particular clean of high altitude that makes everything feel closer to something honest.
Dominic is on the porch. Sitting in the chair with the Wendell Berry in his lap, open to a page he's not reading.
He sees me coming from a block away. I know because his posture changes. Subtle. The straightening of someone who's been waiting without admitting they're waiting.
I walk up the three porch steps and stand in front of him.
"They caught them."
He sets the book down. "When?"
"Yesterday. Grand Junction. Brianna's real name is Brianna Kemp. Her boyfriend is a former publicist my label fired two years ago. It was a money play. Threats designed to escalate until I paid to make them stop."
"And now?"
"FBI has them in custody. Leah says it's airtight. Carlos confirmed the digital trail matches. It's over."
He nods once. Processing. Filing. Closing the threat assessment in his head the way he closes every assessment, with thoroughness and finality.
"Dominic."
He looks up at me.
"You asked me once why you were doing this when you had no obligation.
And you said because you could." I sit on the arm of his chair, close enough that my knee touches his thigh.
"I'm asking myself the same question. Why am I standing on this porch when I could be packing my bag and calling Leah for a flight back to LA? "
"Why are you?"
"Because I love you. And I was too scared to say it two days ago, so I picked a fight about whether it was real, and I've regretted it every second since you walked out that door."
His hand comes up to my hip. Warm. Steady. Anchoring.
"I love you." His voice is low and raw, stripped of every wall he uses to keep the world at a professional distance.
"I've loved you since the diner, Harper.
Since you sat in the corner booth with your back to the wall and looked at me like you were deciding whether I was safe, and all I wanted was to be the thing you decided on. "
I slide off the arm of the chair into his lap. His arms close around me, and I press my forehead to his.
"I'm not easy," I tell him. "My life is loud and public and complicated, and there are going to be cameras and tabloids and people who think they own a piece of me."
"I spent ten years protecting people from exactly that."
"This isn't a job."
"No." He tucks my hair behind my ear. "It's not. I'm not protecting you from your life. I want to be in it."
I kiss him on his uncle's porch with the sunset turning the mountains gold behind us and the sound of Summit Falls settling into its evening routine. Betty closing the diner. June turning on the inn's porch light. A truck rumbling down Main Street toward one of the ranches.
He kisses me back with his arms tight around my waist and his mouth warm and certain, and when we break apart, he's smiling. A real one. The kind that reaches.
"Come back to the inn with me," I say.
"Give me ten minutes. I need to tell my uncle something."
"What?"
"That I'm extending my visit indefinitely."
He goes inside. I sit in his chair and pick up the Wendell Berry. It's open to a poem about staying. About the courage it takes to love a place and a person enough to stop leaving.
The spine is cracked so deep on this page that the book falls open to it on its own.
He comes back out. Takes my hand. We walk down Main Street together, past the diner and the gallery and the general store, past the streetlight and the bench where I first ate a muffin without checking for cameras.
At the inn, June looks up from the front desk, sees our hands, and slides a single key across the counter.
"Room seven has a better view," she says. "And a bigger bed."
Dominic picks up the key. "Thank you, June."
"Don't thank me. Just don't make me regret moving you upstairs. The walls are thin and I'm too old for what I think I'm about to overhear."
She says it with a straight face. Dominic chokes on nothing. I laugh so hard I bend double, and it's the real kind, the kind that reaches, the kind that only happens when you're exactly where you belong.
We go upstairs. He locks the door. Pulls me against him and kisses me slow and deep, and this time there's no urgency, no desperation, no clock running down.
Just his mouth on mine and his hands in my hair and the quiet certainty that this is the beginning of something neither of us is going to run from.
"I want to write a song about this town," I tell him.
"About Summit Falls?"
"About how it feels to be somewhere nobody wants anything from you except for you to be okay." I trace the scar along his ribs with my fingertip. "About a man who sees you before you're ready to be seen and waits until you are."
He catches my hand. Brings it to his mouth. Kisses my palm.
"Write whatever you want. I'll be right here."
"You don't have to guard the door anymore."
"I know." He laces his fingers through mine. "I'm choosing to stay on the other side of it."
I pull him toward the bed. The bigger bed, in the room with the better view, in the inn run by a woman who sees everything and judges nothing, in a town that holds people whether they meant to stay or not.
He wraps himself around me in the dark, and I press my ear to his heartbeat, and I say it again because I can. Because nobody is listening except him. Because the words belong to us now.
"I love you, Dominic."
His arms tighten around me. His mouth presses against my hair.
"I love you, Harper. The real one. The only one that matters."
Tomorrow I'll call Leah and tell her I'm not coming back to LA yet. That I need time. That Summit Falls has something I've been looking for since I was sixteen and too famous to know I'd lost it.
Tonight I close my eyes and sleep without a single light on.