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“Oh, you’re onscreen!” Willow yells. “Wave, Melody!”
I glance up, shocked to findmeon the screen. Red dress, red lipstick. I give a little wave, and the camera pans back around to Jacob.
Wait.
I step back from the glass, my hands shaking.
“Was that broadcast?”
Aspen nods. She spots my concern and gestures for me to join her at the back of the suite. Far from cameras… hopefully. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I just wasn’t expecting to have my face… everywhere.” I grimace. “I don’t like attention.”
“Maybe someone who knows you will reach out?” She hums. “I’m sure you have other friends out there who just don’t know that you’re…”
“A shell of who I used to be?”
“Well, that’s not very nice.”
It’s true, though. Dad said it, too. Not in so many words. But even as he was trying to manipulate me into thinking he was some wrongly accused angel—and never coming out to say that I was the one who put him in prison—he was judging me.
And sure enough, my phone rings a moment later.
I glance at the private number and consider letting it go to voicemail. I haven’t set up the answering page, so an automated voice just reads off the number and tells callers to leave a message.
In fact, I haven’t responded at all.
Which is why maybe I don’t feel too bad about hitting the green button instead of the red one.
“What do you want?” I ask, meeting Aspen’s gaze.
She offers me a small nod of encouragement and steps back. Giving me privacy. She goes back to her seat, leaving me to face this alone.
I get it. If I was her, I wouldn’t want to intrude.
“Hey, darling.” My ex’s smokey voice fills my ear.
I can’t prove it’s him, but I know it nonetheless. It’s a weird feeling. His voice is familiar and different. It’s hard and rough, but if he changed his tone… I don’t think it was all my fault that I fell for him when we first met.
“You’re at a Guardians game,” he continues. “In a suite. My, how the tides have turned for you.”
My throat closes.
“I warned you that I would expose your relationship with your student. You went back to him when I told you not to.”
He did?
“Why?”
He chuckles. “Why? Because I don’t fucking share, Melody. You knew that when you agreed to marry me.”
“We got a divorce. You have no hold over me.”
“That’s what you said when I found you in Crown Point. You went right back to your student. Did you forget about the cameras he had planted in your house? The way hewatchedyou without you knowing?”
My blood goes cold.
I knew there was something else. Something Jacob wasn’t telling me.
