Epilogue…
One Year Later…
Hudson
One year.
Three hundred and sixty-five damn days.
And I still check Miles Whitaker’s Instagram stories like a jilted ex with a bottle of tequila in one hand and a Google search for how to win back the love of your life without looking like a stalker in the other.
Only now, the tequila’s been replaced with protein shakes and overpriced adaptogenic mushroom tinctures, because I’m technically a responsible adult these days. And Google? Well, I fired her. She never gave me the answers I wanted anyway.
Let’s get one thing straight—I didn’t pine. Not at first. I worked. Like hell.
Four months after I left Rehoboth Beach and wrapped the first movie, I landed another lead role—this time in Blood Voltage: Nightstrike. A dark, brooding adaptation of a cult-classic video game, it cast me as a half-human, half-cybernetic vengeance machine named Kade Virell, who hunts down corporate warlords in a post-apocalyptic metropolis. There were guns. There were smirks. There was an unfortunate leather trench coat I had to wear in 113-degree desert heat. It premiered to sold-out showings, and Rotten Tomatoes called it shockingly nuanced. I think they meant that as a compliment.
Five months after that, I landed Neon Crusader, a superhero origin flick where I wore a rubber suit that hugged my ass so tightly I thought it might cut off circulation to my brain. I played Jetman, a bisexual sky-surfing vigilante with trauma and cheekbones sharp enough to slice through federal crime. Critics loved it. Fanboys dressed like me at Comic-Con. Someone even got a tattoo of my face—well, Jetman’s face—on their calf, which still haunts me when I close my eyes.
The roles just kept pouring in.
I was back. The bad-boy Hollywood Phoenix rising from the ashes of scandal and wine-stained gossip columns.
And yet…
Underneath the flashbulbs, the premieres, the humiliating but very well-compensated talk show interviews… I still felt hollow. Like I left something important in Rehoboth Beach. Like a suitcase I forgot to pack.
Except it wasn’t a suitcase. It was a man.
Miles Whitaker.
Mother fucking damn it.
He was still him. Polished. Precise. A gentle menace with a mandoline slicer. I followed him on all his social media platforms. Quietly, of course. Never liked a post. Never commented. But I saw everything.
He had that same crisp, coastal aesthetic I used to tease him about—the cottagecore meets neurotic genius branding that he pulled off so effortlessly. Everything was still draped in light pastels and artful napkin folds. Only now… he had leveled up.
His new HGTV show, Perfectly Placed, was a runaway hit. He’d go into people’s cluttered homes like some kind of beige-clad avenging angel and reorganize their entire lives—pantries, closets, emotional trauma, all of it. Moms loved him. Dads flirted with him. TikTok reenacted his signature labeling sigh.
And now?
Now, the man was also launching a Food Network series next week. Organized Bites. A half-cooking, half-lifestyle show where he taught viewers how to braise short ribs and create a color-coded spice drawer while wearing a monogrammed apron. It hadn’t even premiered yet, and it was already trending.
I watched the trailer five times in a row.
And you know what?
I wasn’t bitter.
I was proud of him.
Because I knew what he’d been through. The cheating ex. The stress. The pressure to be perfect. And still, he climbed.
Meanwhile, I was in a glass-walled condo in West Hollywood with a fridge full of sparkling water I never drank and a view of the city I barely noticed anymore. My agent told me I had six offers sitting on my desk. Streaming series. A trilogy. An invitation to host the after-party of the fucking Oscars.
But none of it mattered.
Not really.
Because the one person I wanted to share all of this with—the one who saw me at my absolute worst, who held me when I discussed my history about my family, who made me laugh so hard I spilled Bloody Mary mix down a Ralph Lauren dress shirt—wasn’t here.
He never was mine, not really.
He was the ocean: beautiful, untouchable, and always slipping through my fingers the second I thought I could hold onto him.
And maybe that’s what love really is.
Not the dramatic gestures or cinematic reunions. Not the kiss in the rain or the grand speeches on airport tarmacs. Maybe it’s the quiet ache that never fully leaves. The text you never send. The photo you never unlike. The face you still see when you close your eyes.
I opened Instagram again.
There he was.
Holding a skillet of garlic-butter scallops and smiling like he didn’t know he’d permanently restructured my heart with a single look under the moonlight one year ago.
I watched the story.
Muted, of course.
Because hearing his voice would wreck me.