Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
CHARLOTTE
“Not now,” Logan says.
His voice is low enough that someone else might mistake it for calm. I know better. I hear the hard edge under it, the way every word is being held in place by force.
The phone sits on the kitchen island between us, Peter’s call still open on speaker.
“I got the rest of the footage,” Peter had said.
Now none of us breathe right.
The charcoal box is still beside Logan’s elbow.
His journals are inside it. His letters.
All those quiet proofs of love he never meant me to find.
The kitchen lights are soft over the marble.
Outside, the house is dark except for the porch lamps and the long black windows reflecting the room back at us.
For one terrible second, I see my own face in the glass.
Pale. Red-eyed. Standing in the house I left with a box of his heart open between us, faced with the possibility of seeing the thing that destroyed mine.
“Logan,” Peter says, and this time his voice is different.
Not urgent the way he gets when he is trying to manage a crisis. Not irritated. Not even lawyer-sharp.
Quiet.
Careful.
Like he is holding something with both hands and doesn't know whether setting it down will save us or break us further.
“I said not now,” Logan says.
His hand closes around the phone. He hasn’t looked at me since Peter said the words. He's staring at the island as if the marble has instructions carved into it.
Peter exhales. “I understand why you’re saying that.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do,” Peter says. “But you need to see it.”
Something in that sentence moves through me like a cold draft under a door.
Not the words. The need in them.
I've heard Peter frantic. I've heard him furious. I've heard him exhausted enough to sound like he is being kept upright by caffeine and professional resentment.
I haven't heard him sound shaken.
Logan’s jaw flexes. “Send it to my lawyer.”
“I already did. I also sent it to you.”
“Then we’re done.”
“Logan.”
“Peter.”
“Listen to me. I got it from the editor Brooke used.”
The room changes.
Logan lifts his head. “What editor?”
Peter’s voice comes through the speaker, tinny and too clear.
“She didn’t cut the first leak herself. She hired a freelance video guy out of Nashville.
Paid him through a creator platform under a brand account, gave him the raw camera files, and told him to make a tight vertical clip.
He says she wanted it to look ‘undeniable but not messy.’ His words, not mine. ”
My fingers go cold.
Undeniable but not messy.
That is my marriage reduced to a content request.
“I ran into a problem when I realized she didn't have the raw files anymore. Or claimed not to,” Peter says. “I didn't tell you because you said you didn't want to upset Charlotte more with a criminal case."
That sentence runs through me like fire through my veins.
"I thought I was sunk. Then the video guy called me."
I look at Logan. His jaw is ticking in that way that tells me he's barely hanging on. I want to reach out and touch him. Instead, I hold on like we're cresting the hill of a roller coaster.
"She uploaded them to him, he downloaded everything for the job, and he kept the project archive because she shorted his final invoice. He saw the livestream tonight. Then he saw you say she recorded you without consent. I think he realized he was sitting on a problem with metadata. He reached out through my office with counsel copied.”
Logan goes still beside me.
“Is it real?” he asks.
“We’re verifying chain of custody, but yes. It has source metadata from the studio camera. Timecode. Original audio. No cuts in the section I’m sending you.”
The kitchen hums around us. Refrigerator. Lights. My pulse in my ears.
Original audio.
That is the part that gets me.
The video that wrecked me had music under it. Not loud. Just enough. Some low, sultry track Brooke must have chosen because she understood humiliation as production value.
The images play in my head again.
His hand in her hair.
Her body pressed to his.
The kiss.
My stomach turns so sharply I have to brace one hand against the island.
Logan notices instantly. “Char.”
“I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not.”
“No,” I say, because I am tired of lying gently. “I’m not.”
He turns toward the phone. “Peter, we’re not watching this tonight.”
“Yes,” I say.
Logan looks at me.
The air between us tightens.
His eyes are bloodshot, dark with fear and something worse than fear. Protection, maybe. That old instinct in him rising hard and fast. Stand between Charlotte and the hit. Take the damage. Carry it alone.
“I think you should listen to him,” I say.
His face changes. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I know.”
“I mean it.” His voice roughens. “You never have to see that again. Not for me. Not for a case. I can hand it to the lawyers and never let it touch you.”
My throat aches.
That would be easier. It would be kinder in the immediate way. Like putting a clean cloth over a wound because nobody in the room can stand looking at it.
But the wound is still there.
“Logan,” I say. “Play it.”
He shakes his head once. “No.”
“Please.”
His hand opens and closes at his side.
I know that hand. I know the weight of it at my waist, the steady heat of it on the small of my back in crowded rooms, the way it used to find mine under tables when reporters got too loud. I know the ring on it. I know the exact shape of the fingers I saw threaded through Brooke Greenlee’s hair.
I also know the same hand held Greg Norris down on the Conservatory floor and didn't let go until the police took him.
I know it scraped paint from old iron before sunrise.
I know it wrote my name across envelope after envelope and never sent them because he thought his grief wasn't mine to carry.
“Play it,” I say again.
Logan looks at me for a long time.
Then he picks up the phone.
Peter says nothing. A moment later, Logan’s screen lights with a file link. He taps it, then hesitates.
“Char.”
“I’m here.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
The words nearly undo me.
I step closer, not touching him, but close enough that he can feel the decision in my body. “I’m here.”
He swallows. Then he presses play.
The first frame is enough to make my knees loosen.
The studio. That soft, expensive light Brooke had built around him.
The leather sofa. The low table with the bottle.
The stupid backdrop with Logan’s name and Kingsley Gold’s gold-lit branding.
I've seen pieces of this room in nightmares.
I've seen it frozen on strangers’ phones in the café line, on gossip sites, in the brutal blue-white glare of my own screen the morning my life split open.
Brooke is sitting too close to him.
Logan’s shirt is partly unbuttoned at the throat. His head is angled down, and even before he moves, I can tell.
He's drunk. Not pleasantly loosened. Not charmingly warm. Gone in that heavy, slowed way that makes his body look too large for the room and too difficult for him to manage. His elbow slips against the back of the couch. He catches himself a beat late.
My stomach turns again.
Brooke laughs softly and touches his chest.
I close my eyes.
I can't watch the beginning. I know it too well. My mind fills in the shape of it. Her hand. His face turning. The closing distance. The instant my heart learned a new way to stop.
The sound is worse than the image ever was.
Not because there's anything dramatic in it, but because there isn’t. The room is quiet except for the low ventilation, the faint clink of glass as Brooke sets something down, and Logan’s breath, uneven and thick.
“Stay a little longer,” Brooke says on the video.
“Need to go,” Logan mutters.
His voice is slurred.
My eyes open.
On screen, Brooke’s smile doesn’t falter. She leans in, her hand sliding up to his jaw. “You’re always leaving right when you start being honest.”
“I’m not—” Logan stops. Blinks hard. “Not doing this.”
Except then she kisses him.
And he lets her.
The hurt lands the same. It doesn’t care that I'm braced for it. It hits exactly the same place it did the first time, the one I thought had scarred over but has only been waiting.
His hand lifts. His fingers touch her hair.
I hear a small sound and realize it came from me.
Beside me, Logan goes rigid.
On screen, for a few seconds, there is exactly what the world saw. Enough. Too much. His mouth on hers. Her body pressed forward. His wedding ring visible when his hand shifts against her shoulder.
Then the moment changes.
Brooke climbs closer, one knee pressing into the couch cushion beside his thigh. Her hand moves over his chest, lower than the leaked clip showed. Logan’s hand drops from her hair to her wrist.
At first, I think he is pulling her closer. Then I see his fingers tighten.
“No,” he says.
Brooke keeps kissing him.
He turns his head away.
“No,” he says again, louder, though the word sounds almost as if it were said underwater.
Brooke laughs, breathless and irritated. “You’re fine.”
“I’m not.”
He pushes her wrist down. Not violently. Not cleanly either. He's too drunk for clean. But he pushes.
Brooke sits back just enough for the camera to catch her face. The expression on it isn't seductive now. It's annoyed.
Logan drags a hand down his face and tries to sit forward. His knee clips the table. The bottle rocks. Brooke grabs it before it falls.
“Careful,” she says, sharp.
“Shouldn’t have—” He stops, breathing hard. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
Beside me in the dark kitchen, Logan’s breathing hitches. I don't look at him. My eyes are glued to the small glowing screen between us, my hand clamped tight over my mouth.
On the video, he's staring at the floor, blinking too slowly, like he is trying to pull one clear thought through deep water.
Brooke’s voice softens again. “Logan.”
“No.”
“You wanted to.”
“I’m drunk.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is.”
She shifts closer, and he flinches. Not big. Not dramatic. But I see it because I've watched this man’s body for years. I know the difference between invitation and recoil.
My stomach goes hollow.
“Don’t,” he says.