Ivy doesn’t try to interrupt again. She keeps her arm on mine and lets me get it out.
“My parents, doctors, Harrison, and Rowan. That’s the list of people who’ve seen my birthmark — but Mason mentioned it in the kitchen, and now it’s in the post.” I sob. “Mason said he wasn’t threatening me, and I wanted to believe that because the alternative was too big to look at, and I’ve been so careful since then, Ivy.”
“That’s why you’ve been weird.”
I nod. “I’ve been careful not to give him a reason to explode, but he did anyway.”
Ivy stops. Students stream around us on both sides, a few of them looking sideways at us because they’ve clearly read the thread. But Ivy hasn’t flinched, staring down everyone who stares at us until they look away.
“You told me you were fine, and I believed you because I am trying to be the kind of friend who lets people have their minute, and you were carrying this the entire time?” she says. “I peeled you off that mattress this morning. I picked your sweater. You let me do the whole routine, and the whole time, you were drowning.” A beat. “Why didn’t you let me help you?”
“I didn’t want to put this on you.” The words come out ragged and honest and I didn’t plan them. “If I said it out loud it was real, then I’d have to do something about it, and I know the minute I did that you would have donned your bitch armor and gone into battle, and you’d have enlisted Rowan in the campaign.”
“Oh, fuck off.” Her eyes are wet and furious. “Don’t do that. You don’t get to do it too.”
“Ivy—”
“My whole life.” Her voice drops. “I’ve been the person who gets told last. Rowan handles it, my parents handle it, and everyone just decides what Ivy can know, what Ivy can handle,and then I find out anyway.” She presses her lips together. “Everything is handled for me or paved with my parents’ money or influence, but I thought you were different.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Yeah.” She lets out a huff, then looks at me for a second, then wraps her arms around me. “And you didn’t tell Rowan?”
“No.”
“And that’s why the two of you have been pulling in opposite directions, because you won’t tell him and he hasn’t figured it out.”
I sigh. “Yes, maybe, I?—”
“Why?” She cuts me off, her question as sharp as her voice.
Because the last time someone found out about Harrison, it stopped being about me. It became about the damage. The optics. The cleanup. And I know Rowan isn’t my parents, but I can still feel the shape of what my parents did, and I’m terrified of watching it happen again in someone else’s hands.
I think all of that, but I don’t say it.
I give her the other reason.
“Rowan is already not okay,” I say. “He is barely holding it all together — trying to be everything to everyone and solve all the world’s problems — and if I hand him this, he will set fire to his life and to Mason and his team to fix it and help me, no matter what the consequences are.”
“Yeah,” she says. “He will.”
Ivy’s hand moves toward her jacket pocket, and I know what she’s going to do before she does it. She pulls out her phone and I see Rowan’s name flash on the screen before I move, and for just a second, I flirt with the idea of letting her — and him — handle it.
It would be easier, but it would be wrong.
The phone is already ringing when I grab her wrist. “Don’t,” I say.
“Sloane—”
“Don’t, Ivy, please. I love him.” The word comes out, and it sits in the air between us. I can’t take it back. “I love him, and I’m not letting this destroy him.”
“He’d want to know,” she says, her hand hovering over the red button. “You’re asking me to do the exact thing to him I just told you I hate.”
“I know he’ll find out, but I don’t want him to link it to Mason,” I say. “I know you don’t want to contain this, but I’m asking anyway.”
The phone continues to ring, and I watch her fight herself.
Then she hits the red button and I can see how much it costs her to put the phone back in her pocket. She does it slowly, exhaling through her nose, slow and hard, and the breath makes a faint cloud in the cold air.
