Chapter 20
The Email
It was Jax who mentioned it first, over pasta on a Sunday in late February, the whole team gathered around the too-small table.
"Hey, did your uncle end up calling you back?" he asked Beck, mouth half full. "The marketing guy? I feel like that's been going on a while now."
Beck's face did something small and careful.
"What marketing guy?" Tessa asked, setting down her fork. "And what do you mean 'a while now,' Jax?"
"It's nothing," Beck said, too fast.
Jax kept going, oblivious. "Some family friend of Tessa's reached out about a brand deal. Sports drink company, wanted Beck for a campus ambassador thing. He's mentioned it a couple times since December, I think? Pretty solid opportunity, my cousin did something similar—"
"Jax."
"What? I'm just saying it's a good—"
"Since December." Tessa's stomach had gone tight and cold, something worse than surprise settling into her chest. "It's February. What family friend, exactly, and how long has this actually been happening?"
Beck set down his fork, meeting her eyes with visible reluctance.
"Your Uncle Sal. Aunt Connie's husband. He does marketing, and one of his clients wanted a hockey player for a campus ambassador thing.
He found me through your Instagram, I think.
He called in December, and again a couple weeks ago. "
"Two calls. Two months. And you didn't think that was something to mention to me? Considering it's my aunt's husband. Considering my aunt hasn't spoken to my mother in almost a year."
"I didn't want to make it a whole thing. It's got nothing to do with the family stuff between the sisters—"
"It has everything to do with the family stuff.
" Her voice was rising now, the whole table going quiet.
"They don't reach out unless there's something in it for them.
You think my uncle found you by accident?
He found you because you're dating me, and he saw a connection he could use, and you let him call you twice over two months and said nothing, both times. "
"I didn't let him do anything. I haven't even called him back."
"But you didn't tell me. Not the first time, in December, and not the second time, weeks ago.
" Her voice cracked. "Beck, I have spent my entire life being loved for what I could provide.
My boyfriend of five years left me because his father decided our family scandal made me a liability, said it to my face two weeks after we buried my grandfather.
My aunts stopped speaking before he was even in the ground.
And now the person I've let myself actually love had a business opportunity handed to him through my family, twice, and chose, twice, to keep it from me. "
"That's not fair," Beck said, real frustration in his voice for the first time.
"I turned down the deal in my head the second he called the first time.
I didn't say anything because I didn't want to give this family drama one more inch of space in our relationship. I was trying to protect you from it."
"You don't get to decide what protects me. You don't get to make that call without me in the room."
"So what do you want me to do? Live in some bubble where every opportunity has to be pre-approved for potential family trauma?"
"I want you to have told me," she said, the anger draining into something closer to grief. "That's the whole thing. I care that you knew, since December, that my uncle used you to get to me, and decided, twice, that wasn't information I needed."
Toni reached across the table, hand hovering. Nina had gone very still, watching exactly which old wound had just been ripped open.
"I need to go," Tessa said, standing up so fast her chair scraped loud against the floor, the whole kitchen frozen around her.
Beck didn't stop her. She would spend a long time afterward wondering if that was the moment that actually broke something, more than the email itself, more than her uncle's opportunism, more than any of it.
Not that he'd kept a secret. That when she'd finally reached the edge of her fear and needed him to reach back, to fight for it, he'd let her walk out the door instead, exactly the way she'd always secretly believed, deep down, that he eventually would.
? ? ?
They didn't speak for eleven days. Tessa knew the exact number because she counted.
She threw herself into schoolwork, into long, silent walks around the lake with her phone left deliberately in her dorm room, into a familiar armor: I don't need anyone, I built myself alone once and I can do it again.
Nina didn't push, just showed up, made tea, existed nearby.
Toni was less patient. On day six, Toni let herself into Tessa's dorm with the spare key and sat down on the end of the bed the exact way she had that first terrible night after the funeral.
"Okay," she said. "I've given you six days to sulk. I love you, and I'm about to say something you're not going to want to hear."
"Toni—"
"You did the thing again." Toni's voice was gentle but unflinching.
"You take a real hurt — and it was a real hurt, he should have told you — and you use it as proof of the worst possible story instead of the one that actually happened.
Beck didn't take that deal. He said no in his own head the second he heard about it.
He tried, badly, to shield you from ever having to know your uncle did something slimy.
That's a mistake he should apologize for.
But it's not Tyler. It's not your aunts.
It's not the same story just because it rhymes with the old one. "
"How do you know it's not the same story?"
"Because I've watched you build an entire life up here. Real friends who show up. A boy who let your dad interrogate him for an entire evening without a single complaint. You are allowed to believe that's real, Tessa. You don't have to keep bracing for it to disappear."
Tessa sat with that for a long time after Toni left.
She'd been so busy protecting herself from becoming a math problem again that she'd turned Beck into one instead, weighed his silence against every betrayal in her past and convicted him of a crime that belonged to other men entirely.
Nina found her that night, sitting on the floor of her dorm room, phone in her lap, staring at their unanswered text thread.
"You gonna text him?"
"I don't know how to apologize for something that felt so completely real while I was doing it, like I wasn't even choosing it, like it was just happening to me."
"You just say that," Nina said, sitting down beside her on the floor, bumping their shoulders together the way she had since they were four years old sitting on a pool deck somewhere.
"You say exactly that, word for word if you need to.
He'll understand it. He's spent five months proving he actually listens when you tell him hard things. "
Tessa picked up her phone. She didn't know yet that just three miles away, across campus, a boy who'd been skating alone every single one of those eleven nights because it was the only place his head went quiet enough to think, had already decided he wasn't waiting for a text either.
He was done being the guy who let her walk out the door without a fight.