Chapter 48 What I Choose to Tell
Sloane’s POV
Seeing your own life turned into television is like watching someone else wear your skin.
We were back in New York, the city humming outside my windows, when the segment finally aired. Harper insisted on being there. Eli did not say he needed to be, he just showed up with takeout and three beers and sat on my couch like he belonged.
The opening graphic was tasteful. Slow piano, black screen, my name in white.
“Sloane Mercer has been called many things,” the voice over said. “Prodigy. Ice queen. Savior. Villain. Tonight, she tells us her story.”
I wanted to turn it off right there.
Harper snorted and threw a piece of popcorn at the screen. “At least they did not lead with your love life,” she said.
Yet, I thought.
On screen, the camera cut to me in that gray studio chair, the one that had started to feel like a confessional booth. Edited me looked calm. Sharp. A little brittle around the edges.
“I was pretty quiet as a kid,” my recorded self said. “Curious. Obsessed with computers.”
They spliced in photos I had forgotten I had given them. Me at twelve at a desk too big for me. Me at graduation, hair straighter, smile tighter. A shot of my father’s hand on my shoulder, his face turned toward some man off camera.
The piece did what it was supposed to. It hinted at control without naming every bruise.
She grew up under the eye of Graham Mercer, the narrator said. A successful investor, by all accounts demanding. Sloane describes feeling more like an asset than a daughter.
On screen, I talked about cracking our home computer’s parental controls, about poking at my father’s firm as a teenager. They did not show the text file that had said Your perimeter is a joke, just a blurred screenshot and a line about early hacks.
They cut to old footage of the incubator. A pan across whiteboards and twenty something faces, stopping on Noah and me at a folding table, laptops open. He leaned over my shoulder, laughing. I looked up at him like he had just handed me the moon.
Eli went very still beside me.
The narrator said words like cofounder and betrayal and settlement. I said phrases like we disagreed about the future of certain tools and ultimately, we parted ways for legal and ethical reasons.
I did not say god mode. I did not say Security Research Council. I did not say HERA. I had steered hard around anything that would give our enemies free data.
They threaded the line carefully. Brilliant. Damaged. Ruthless about code, empathetic with certain clients. Hungry to build, wary of power.
It could have been worse.
“I am relieved and I hate it,” I muttered when the credits finally rolled.
Harper clicked the volume down. “That means it hit the middle,” she said. “You did not come off as a saint or as Satan. They left room for people to make up their own minds.”
“Some already have,” Eli said, nodding at his phone.
He read a few out loud. Survivor. Innovator. Control freak. Manipulator. Trauma PR.
Another commenter wrote, She looks like a person for the first time, not a robot.
I did not know whether to laugh or throw up.
Watching my own face on screen saying things I had spent years locking away felt like an out of body experience. That girl in the footage with the messy hair and the too bright eyes. The one grinning at Noah in the lab. The one sitting stiff beside her father at a dinner table while he talked about innovative defense tech prospects.
Part of me wanted to go back in and shake her. The rest of me wanted to wrap her in something bulletproof and tell her to run.
Harper squeezed my knee. “Now that your history is out there, they have more context to hurt you with,” she said, never one for sugar coating. “But you also have more sympathetic eyes watching. Do not forget that part.”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
Eli was quiet. When I finally looked at him, his gaze was on one of the paused frames. Me and Noah, side by side, early Mercer banner behind us. The focus in my eyes, the trust.
“That was a different lifetime,” I said.
“I know,” he answered. The jealousy in his face was small, real, and swallowed by something heavier. Pride. Sadness. Anger at other men who had not known what to do with me.
“They needed to see where you started,” he added softly. “To understand how far you climbed.”
Later, when the apartment was quiet again and Harper had gone home muttering about drafting responses to the worst takes, I tried to sleep.
My brain refused.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw some edited version of myself. Sixteen year old me lit for drama. Twenty two year old me laughing with Noah. Thirty year old me staring down a camera, carefully not saying Eli’s name.
At two in the morning I gave up. My feet took me down the hall before my pride could stop them.
I knocked on Eli’s door, two soft raps.
He opened almost immediately, hair mussed, T shirt wrinkled, sleep still in his eyes. He looked me over like he was scanning for visible wounds.
“I do not want to be alone in my head tonight,” I said.
He stepped aside without a word, letting me in.
We lay on top of the covers, fully clothed, facing each other across the narrow stretch of mattress. The room smelled like soap and him. The city glow seeped in through the curtains, painting his face in blue and gold.
For a while we just breathed.
“Things I did not tell them,” I said eventually. “The night my father signed the Avalon Ridge option and poured himself a drink. How the consultant looked at me like a new car. How I thought being useful was the same as being safe.”
He listened. “First time I saw a kid with a gun bigger than his arm,” he said in return. “How I smiled at him like we were on the same side when I did not know what side I was on anymore.”
We traded details that had not made the cut. Little ones. The sound of the incubator fridge humming all night. The way Amira hummed to herself when she read. My mother, eaten by depression and then simply gone one day, leaving my father and his contracts.
His forearm lay between us. In the dim light I could see a thin raised line along the muscle. An old scar I had never really looked at.
I reached out, hesitated, then traced it with the tip of my finger.
He sucked in a breath, but did not move away.
“Shrapnel,” he said. “Nothing big.”
“It cut you,” I said. Stupid, obvious, but it felt like a statement about more than metal.
His hand found mine, turned it palm up against the sheet. His thumb brushed the faint line where that splinter had once been in the cabin, the one he had pulled out with such care.
We lay there, hands touching, sharing air.
The words were right there, pressing at the back of my teeth. I love you. Simple. Terrifying. Bigger than any contract I had ever signed.
“I do not know who I would be in this without you,” I said instead. That was true in every direction I could see. Without him in the hallway. Without him in the cabin. Without him in that hotel room when I knocked.
His eyes softened. He squeezed my hand once, firm.
“I am glad we do not have to find out,” he said.
He heard everything I had not said. It sat there between us, warm and dangerous and ours.