Chapter thirty-one
Violet
The plane claws its way out of the sky and drops into Sydney, and I swear my body feels like it’s been dragged behind it the whole way. I haven’t slept. I haven’t eaten.
Sixteen hours in a metal tube with no escape, no answers, and way too much time to imagine every worst-case scenario on a loop. My eyes burn, and my brain is cooked. I spent most of the flight yanking myself back from the verge of a panic attack every forty minutes, like clockwork.
Now I’m home but the word doesn’t sit right anymore. My apartment looks the same as when I left, with its scuffed skirting boards and secondhand couch. But it doesn’t feel mine anymore. I thought by the end of the tour I’d be desperate for my own shower and bed.
I don’t want any of it.
Instead, I want a hotel room that smells like him, a bed creased with his weight, and his stupid paper rose on my pillow. I want Carter, in whatever time zone, in whatever city.
I leave my luggage in the living room, my legs carrying me to my bedroom. I plug my dead phone into the wall and sit on the edge of the bed, elbows on my knees, head hanging low.
It’s been two days. It was a long flight, but when you add in the cruel math of time zones, it swallowed up whole chunks of my life. One day gone in the air. Another erased by the clock.
Everything that happened at LAX, everything that exploded online . . . all of it has already lived an entire news cycle without me. People have reacted, judged, and speculated while I was strapped into seat 42A, breathing recycled air.
Now, I’m about to see the reality of it.
For sixteen hours, my brain played disaster reels. Yet somehow, these last few minutes . . . these last few seconds, waiting for my phone to turn on, are even worse.
My body knows something ugly is coming; my hands won’t stop shaking. My fingers tapping against my thigh becomes the only thing keeping me tethered.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The screen remains black.
I press the power button.
Nothing.
“Come on,” I mutter, pushing harder on the button to make it work faster. “Come on, you piece of shit.”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I try again, holding the button longer.
Still nothing.
Heat pricks up my neck. I grip the phone harder.
“You fucking piece of shit.” I pull my arm back, aiming for the wall—then stop myself.
I need the traitorous little fucker, and the thought of dragging myself to a shopping center right now to get a replacement phone makes me want to lie down on the floor and never get up.
One more try.
The Apple logo finally blooms on the screen.
I sag forward, a shaky breath ripping out of me. “Thank you,” I whisper to the phone like a lunatic.
My free hand is drenched with sweat, so I wipe it on my thigh.
The home screen loads.
Then the notifications hit. They explode like shrapnel.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
Banners stack over each other. Voicemails. Texts. Emails.
Names blur together, but I’m only hunting for one.
My thumb moves fast to the voicemail tab.
But it’s not there. Not a single one.
Instead, there’s one from Megan. Then Liam. More Liam. Another Liam.
My heart sinks lower, into my stomach.
Onto texts. Liam again—message after message. Chris. A few numbers I don’t recognize that I’m not touching with a ten-foot pole.
Still no Carter.
All I can hear is the whoosh of blood in my ears.
I open Chris’s message first, because whatever Liam has to say is going to cut bone-deep, and I don’t have the strength for that yet.
Chris
He’s asked that you don’t contact him. If you truly love him her shrewd gaze following us in VIP areas, airport lounges, and hotel conference rooms; her declaration that she would sleep with him one way or another.
Was this . . . revenge? Sabotage to ensure she got her chance on the last stop of the tour?
But how . . . Did I accidentally send her the wrong image link on our last day in Milan?
I flop back on the bed, head sinking into the mattress.
It doesn’t matter now. All that matters is what comes next.
The familiar cracks in the ceiling paint blur.
I’ve survived shitty kids at school, years of feeling like the unwanted extra in my own life.
I’ve survived worse than this, technically. But this time, it’s different.
Somewhere between Singapore and Como, I finally started to like the person I was becoming. I let myself want things and stopped hiding behind anger long enough to feel something else. I became someone who didn’t flinch every time happiness got too close.
Carter helped pull that version of me to the surface.
Lying here, staring at nothing, I can’t help but feel her slipping away. The old reflexes—shut down, armor up, don’t need anyone—scratch at the boundaries, begging to be let back in.
I’m not just at risk of losing my career and watching my reputation go up in flames. Or losing the future Carter and I were working toward.
What really guts me is the slow, sick awareness that this new version of me is sliding out of my grip, one finger at a time.