“Don’t pretend like you don’t like being noticed,” he whispered, lips almost at her ear.
His hand slid lower, cupping her, pressing possessively. Her body locked. The world narrowed to the hot pressure of his palm, the rising rush of shame in her ears.
“What did he do?” Harrison asks, breaking her from the trance.
Madison is back in Harrison’s office. Tuesday.
She clears her throat. “He’s… touched me. He makes… explicit comments. When no one else is around.” The wordexplicitfeels too light in her mouth. “Sexually explicit. It’s only getting worse. So I wanted to tell someone now—while he’s on his trip. Because I don’t feel comfortable working under him anymore.” She meets Harrison’s gaze. “I know his position here. But if this isn’t taken seriously… I’ll have to leave. And I don’t want to.”
Harrison leans forward, pen forgotten, forearms braced on the desk. “Madison. I’m… disgusted to hear this. That isnotacceptable behavior anywhere, but especially not here at Pacific Records.”
“Thank you.” Madison gulps. She bites a wobble in her lip, happy to feel validated, but reeling from saying the words out loud. To a man, at that.
“I want this to be a safe space for you… Of course, I’ll need to formally involve HR, with your blessing. That way we can follow the proper protocols.”
Madison nods, her molars digging into the inside of her cheek until she tastes iron on her tongue.
“Okay,” he says, smiling politely. He pulls his keyboard closer to his palms. “I’ll need to document this conversation. I will only share this with HR, and then they’ll have a conversation with you. We have a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment.” He nods. “Do you feel comfortable sharing the specifics with me?”
She sighs, knowing she isn’t. But she has to.
“I can start from the beginning.”
Madison shrugs on her duster as she ducks out of the Pacific Records building, relieved that dreaded conversation is over. She feels lighter. Harrison had taken her seriously. Now she may not have to leave the label after all. But she knows the storm isn’t over. Peter will be back in town next week. Knowing him, he probably won’t go quietly.
She exhales steam into the cool autumn air and fishes her phone from her pocket, thumbs flying across the screen to text Macy.
Macy is the only person she’s told about what’s been happening with Peter. Besides Harrison. She promises her best friend she’ll call her later with details but keeps it vague for now:It went well I think? Harrison was supportive, luckily—just like I thought he’d be. I’ll tell you about it later.
She hasn’t found the courage to tell her sister, Phoebe, yet. Or her mom.
After tonight, things might finally start getting better.
Madison tucks the phone away and falls into her familiar walking tempo, heading the same route home she takes every day, rain orshine. The streets are bathed in soft purple light, the last dregs of sun feathering through the buildings as the city eases toward nightfall.
She tries to distract herself by wondering what she’ll eat for dinner, if she might coax Macy out to Seattle for a cocktail rather than a phone call. Anything to keep her mind from circling back to that meeting.
As she rounds the corner onto her quiet block, a black sedan idles at the curb. The passenger door cracks open as she steps onto the sidewalk, startling her. She flinches and stumbles sideways but corrects her path. Until a voice floats from the driver’s seat.
“Madison!” the man calls, casual. As though to say,Funny seeing you here!
The street is otherwise hushed, making the sound of her name too loud. It pins her in place. She forces a dry laugh and crouches toward the open door to see who’s inside.
It’s her ex-boyfriend. Parker Lane.
Her expression drops into a flat line, completely unenthused to run into him.
They’d met in what she used to think was a serendipitous, old-fashioned meet-cute straight from a film. She’d come barreling out of Pacific Records one snowy evening with her head in her phone and collided with him on the sidewalk. He’d bought her mulled wine that night, and for a while after, she’d been charmed. He was attractive, attentive, moody in a way that seemed soulful back then. He had this watchful, intuitive air—complimenting her, showing commitment in ways no man had before. He made her feel chosen. He seemed to truly adore her. At least, that’s how it felt at first. Over time, Madison began to understand that the warmth he wrapped her in was only camouflage. It disguised the calculating, controlling core of him.
She learned, bit by bit, that Parker still lived with his mother, in Seattle, never branching out on his own. On its face, this struck her as peculiar for a man in his late twenties. But Parker had quickly offered an excuse: His mother was dying of an aggressive cancer, and he was simply being a dutiful son. It had moved her, this portrait of loyalty. Until Madison visited their house and saw Meredith with her own eyes: healthy, composed. She looked like she’d stepped off the page of a lifestyle magazine. If anyone in that house had seemed unwell, it was Meredith’s boyfriend, Cale, whose sour breath and trembling hands betrayed his perpetual intoxication.
But Madison figured that, with an uncaring and aloof partner like Cale, Meredith would need outside care if she was indeed ill.
Despite Parker being so tethered to his mother, he’d ripped Madison away from hers—and her entire family. Isolating her in her apartment, he’d love-bomb her relentlessly while simultaneously cutting her down in small, constant ways. He would be waiting outside Pacific Records every evening at 5:30 on the dot, walking her home like a chaperone, ensuring she spent every free evening with him. Not friends. Not family. Only him.
Her feelings were always overreactions, her ambitions became silly games, her friends were “toxic.” And oh, how he cast himself as a martyr. He was always the misunderstood hero, always the wounded boy nursing invisible scars.
By the fifth month, Madison could see him for what he really was: a leech. Nothing but a predatory worm, feeding off Madison’s plump, happy life. A bloodsucking parasite. She couldn’t even see the emotional scars Parker Lane left behind until she broke up with him in July.
