Chapter 81

Chapter 81

Mira’s POV

I waited until Marlo left.

Smiled through the last hour of the evening like someone who hadn’t just had the floor quietly removed from beneath them. Laughed at Zara’s jokes. Finished my wine. Said goodnight to Marlo with a warmth I didn’t feel and watched him kiss Zara’s cheek at the door and leave with the unburdened energy of a man who had finally put something heavy down.

Good for him.

Zara closed the door and turned around glowing in the specific way she’d been glowing lately, leaning against it with her arms crossed and that smile she didn’t know she was wearing.

“Don’t,” she said preemptively.

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You were doing the face.”

“Zara.” I looked at her from the couch. “Sit down.”

Something in my voice reached her immediately. The glow dimmed slightly, replaced by that sharp attention she switched to when she understood the register had changed.

She sat.

“He told me,” I said simply.

She went completely still.

“About the bet,” I continued.

The color shifted in her face. Not draining exactly, more like rearranging, guilt and shock and something that looked like relief moving through it in quick succession before she settled into an expression I recognized as her bracing herself.

“How much?” she asked quietly.

“Enough.” I looked at my hands. “Before I started working for him. Get me into bed. Make a tape.” I paused. “Ace knew the whole time.”

Zara closed her eyes briefly.

“How long have you known?” I asked.

She opened them. “I found out recently. I was trying to figure out how to—” She stopped. “There’s no good version of that sentence, is there?”

“No,” I agreed.

Silence settled between us, the weighted kind.

“Mira.” Her voice dropped into something careful and genuine. “The way he feels about you now—”

“Don’t,” I said quietly.

“I’m just saying that what it started as and what it became are—”

“Zara.” I looked at her properly. “I need you to not defend him right now. I need you to just—” My voice caught slightly and I pulled it back. “I need a minute.”

She pressed her lips together and nodded and said nothing, which cost her visibly and meant everything.

I sat there in the quiet of the living room and let myself actually feel it.

Not the anger, that was too simple. Something more complicated than anger, more textured - the specific humiliation of having fallen for something that started as a game, of having stood in front of that man and said I love you with my whole chest while somewhere in the background a bet existed with my name on it.

Every moment rearranging itself.

The first day. The pool. The way he’d looked at me from the water.

Was that real or was that a man calculating his odds?

The night everything shifted between us. His hands. The things he’d said.

Real or performance?

“The tape,” I said suddenly.

Zara looked at me.

“Did he make it?” I asked flatly.

Her jaw tightened. “I don’t know.”

“Find out,” I said.

“Mira—”

“I need to know, Zara.” My voice came out harder than I intended. “I need to know if there is a tape of me somewhere that started as evidence for a bet between a group of men who thought I was a joke.”

The words landed in the room and sat there ugly and real.

Zara looked at me with an expression that broke something in me even as I held myself completely together.

“I’ll find out,” she said quietly.

I nodded and stood up.

“I’m going to bed,” I said, which was a lie and we both knew it but she let me have it anyway.


I didn’t sleep.

I lay on the couch in the dark and stared at the ceiling and thought about Ace.

Ace who had shown up with groceries. Who had taken me to the waterfront and bought me warm nuts and called me stubbornly alive. Who had held my hand at 2am and told me he loved me with no performance to it. Who had offered to pay for my surgery without making it into something I owed him.

Who had known about the bet the entire time and said nothing.

Not once.

Not a single word while he watched me fall apart over a man whose original intention had been to film me as a trophy.

I pressed my hand flat against my chest.

The ache was there. Always there.

What’s real, I thought. What has any of this actually been?

My phone lit up on the cushion.

Ace: Thinking about you. Sleep well.

I stared at the message for a long time.

Then I put the phone face down and looked back at the ceiling.


Zara found me still awake at 6am.

She came out in her dressing gown, saw my face, and went directly to the kitchen without a word. Came back with two mugs and sat on the floor in front of the couch facing me, cross legged, and handed me mine.

We drank in silence for a moment.

“Say it,” I told her.

“I’ve been thinking all night,” she began carefully.

“That’s not what I meant.” I looked at her. “Say what you actually want to say. Not the managed version. The real one.”

She looked at her mug.

Then she looked at me.

“I want to find Alejandro Montenegro,” she said, “and ask him very calmly and very specifically what kind of man looks at a woman who has survived everything you’ve survived and thinks you know what this situation needs, a bet.” Her voice stayed level but her eyes were doing something furious. “And then I want to find whoever thought a tape was a fun addition to that plan and introduce them to consequences.”

“Zara—”

“I’m not finished.” She lifted her hand briefly. “And then after all of that I want to sit with you and acknowledge that somewhere between the bet and now something real happened because I watched it happen and I’m not blind.” She paused. “But real or not, you deserved to know from the beginning. And not knowing has cost you things you can’t get back. And I’m furious about that on your behalf even if you’re being very quiet about it yourself.”

I looked at her.

“I’m not being quiet,” I said. “I’m just saving it.”

“For what?”

I wrapped both hands around my mug.

“I have a surgeon in Switzerland waiting for me,” I said quietly. “I have a mother who needs to tell me something on Saturday. I have a chest that’s been reminding me every single day that it’s not interested in waiting for me to sort my life out.” I met her eyes. “So I’m saving it for after. When I’m on the other side of all of that and I can fall apart properly without it killing me.”

Zara stared at me.

Then she put her mug down, uncrossed her legs, got up on her knees, and wrapped both arms around me so tightly and so suddenly that I nearly spilled my tea.

“You are the most stubborn person I have ever loved,” she said fiercely into my shoulder.

“I know,” I replied.

“I’m so angry on your behalf.”

“I know.”

“Like genuinely furious, Mira, I could—”

“Zara.”

“What?”

“Thank you,” I said quietly. “For being furious. For not telling me to see his side. For just—” My voice finally cracked, just slightly, just enough. “For being you.”

She held tighter.

And I sat there in the early morning with my best friend’s arms around me and my heart counting down in my chest and everything I thought I knew about the last several months rearranged into something I hadn’t been given a map for.

The question wasn’t whether the feelings had become real.

The question was whether real was enough.