I close my eyes and scrub them really hard, hoping—praying—that what I’m seeing will disappear if I wish hard enough.

    It’s not the first time in my life I’ve hoped for such a thing. It’s also not the first time I’ve been disappointed, because when I open my eyes, the jumbotron is still there. Only the decibel level of the crowd has changed.

    “What the fuck was he thinking?” I whisper.

    “That is the question,” Bianca answers as she settles herself on the bed next to me.

    “What the fuck was he thinking?” This time I shout it as anxiety bubbles up inside of me, rampaging through my bloodstream in a chain reaction that makes my heart beat double time and my lungs shudder for air.

    “When did this happen?” When no one answers immediately, I ask again, louder this time. “How long ago did this happen?”

    “A little over ny minutes,” Bryan tells me grimly.

    “Ny minutes.” The words vibrate under my skin like a string plucked too hard—tight, trembling, about to snap.

    I turn to Bianca. “You got here fast.”

    Her mouth twists in a little grin. “I took a helicopter.”

    “I’ll bet you did.”

    I take a shaky breath and try to shove the panic down, reminding myself that this is different than five years ago. I take another breath and blow it out slowly before finally turning back to the others. Fuuuck, I hate media coverage.

    “Why L.A.?” It’s one of a million questions running through my mind, but it’s the easiest one for me to handle right now.

    “Apparently the Twisters are ying there next weekend. And since it’s the next stop on your tour…” Bianca’s voice trails off. “He did his homework. I’ll give him that much.” I lift a brow.

    “So, it’s going viral?”

    It’s a ridiculous question—of course it’s viral—but their reactions will tell me a lot.

    “Like a gue,” Bryan answers.

    “Like STIs on spring break,” Olivia says at the same time. Wow. Two truly terrible choices. I’m back to panicking again. “So what do we do?” I ask, swiping through my phone in an effort to see how bad the damage is. #sloaney is trending on TikTok and Twitter. Hell, with my luck, it’s probably even made its way to Facebook by now.

    Bianca snatches it from me before I can dive any deeper. “We’ll look at that in a minute,” she tells me firmly. “Olivia has a whole presentation worked up.”

    “In ny minutes?”

    “A hundred minutes now,” Olivia says from her spot at the desk on the other side of the room. She’s got threeptops open in front of her. “It just keeps getting bigger.”

    Of course it does. In this town, drama doesn’t just grow—it metastasizes.

    Jesus. The room starts to spin. “Sloane, you okay?”

    No, I’m not. Not even close. But I force myself to drag a long, slow breath into my constricted lungs. Then another. And another.

    I fell apart once, nearly let the media destroy me.

    When Pauline found me and helped me dig myself out, I promised myself I’d never let it happen again. I’m determined to keep that promise.

    “So what do we do?” I ask. “Where do we start?”

    They exchange a look before Bryan says a little too carefully, “I think that depends on you.”

    “I thought that’s what I paid you for,” I deadpan.

    Bryan sits down next to Bianca and looks like he wants to pat my shoulder in a very there there kind of way.

    I narrow my eyes at him, but—per usual—he just narrows his right back. Though he does pull his hand away as he continues. “We’ve already started formting several ns. But which one we pull the trigger on depends on what you want to do about Sly.”

    “You mean besides murder him?” All I wanted was to get through this tour without kicking up dust or a major news cycle. Thanks to Mateo Sylvester, I’ve done both.

    “There are too many eyes on you right now for murder to be an option,” Bianca answers in a voice that tells me she’s already contemted and discarded the suggestion.

    And they say this business doesn’t have to be toxic. Wow.

    Then she does what she has for every problem I’ve had for thest ten years: she breaks it down and gives me a choice. There’s a reason she’s the best manager a girl could ask for.

    “Before we can do anything, you have to make a decision about Sly,” she exins. “If you’re interested in dating, we’ll do one thing. If you don’t want anything to do with him, we’ll do another. And if you’re somewhere in the middle—currently annoyed but also a little intrigued—we’ll do a third. But until you decide, we’re stuck in a holding pattern.”

    For a normal person, even for a normal pop star, this would probably be fine, no matter how it ends. But for the woman half the world already holds responsible for the deaths of two of its best and brightest, it’s an entirely different story.

    Hayden was brilliant and adorable, funny and a little goofy. And a total asshole, though most of the world doesn’t have a clue. They only remember the sweet kid who died too soon.

    As for Jarrod… Jarrod was everything and nothing. Charming, witty, wonderful one moment and a vicious, desperate riptide the next—the kind you don’t seeing until he’s dragging you down with him.

    Just like with Hayden, none of Jarrod’s worshippers ever saw that side of him. No one did. He reserved that special torment for me.

    For a moment, I’m right back there on that patio.

    ss shattering.

    Water sshing.

    Jarrod’s twisted face screaming into mine.

    No, no, no. I block the memories out. I’m not going there. Not today, not when I need to decide if I’m masochistic enough to even think about opening myself up again.

    But how can I, when he’s too good-looking, too charming, and ording to the Google search I allowed myselfst night, entirely too golden? Dating him would be like going from the frying pan straight into hell.

    No, thank you. Not when I still have the scars from the first two times around. And I always will.

    “What about the public? How are they reacting?”

    “Actually, your fans are loving it. Most of them seem thrilled that you’re finally getting past your grief over Jarrod’s unfortunate death.” Bryan’s voice is as dry as the toast he eats for breakfast. “They are, of course, also fascinated with the man who has finally caught your attention after all these years.”

    “He hasn’t caught my attention,” I protest.

    “Yes, well, they don’t know that,” Bianca tells me. “They’ve even given you two a ship name. Sloaney.”

    I remember seeing the signs at my concert and then again at Sly’s game. “Trust me, I know,” Iin as I flop back on the bed.

    “It’s time to cut through the bullshit,” Bianca says as she pulls a chair next to me, her blue eyes boring into mine. “Be straight with us, Sloane. How do you feel about this guy? Because Olivia has been vetting him all morning and nothing bad has popped up yet. He got in a fight with another yer several years ago, but nothing since. For a twenty-seven-year-old pro ball yer with his looks and talent, he’s almost scary clean.”

    She pauses to shrug out of her zer, draping it carefully over the back of the chair before continuing. “Of course, we’ll keep digging before we make any final decisions, but he passes the first level of background checks.”

    “You’re doing background checks?” I demand, horrified all over again.

    “He just asked you out in front of the entire world without so much as a heads-up,” Bianca shoots back, her voice gentle but firm. “Of course we are. I was careless when it came to vetting yourst partner, and you’re still paying for it yearster, personally and professionally. None of us is going to make that mistake again.”

    “We’ve got you,” Bryan says seriously, and it’s so unlike our usual antagonistic rtionship that tears spring to my eyes.

    “Thank you,” I whisper.

    “We’ve all got you,” Olivia emphasizes. “And whatever you decide to do, we’ll get through it.”

    For a moment, I let myself think about Sly. Not the media. Not my past. Not his too-pretty face and too-perfect body. Just him. The real him.

    The guy who goes all in on taking his grandmother to a concert, who lets his sister paint his nails for practice, and who sends hundred-dor ice cream sundaes to get my attention.

    “The public really doesn’t seem to mind?” I ask, because it seems unlikely.

    “Oh, some of them mind a lot,” Bryan responds with a frown.

    “Of course they do.” My hand trembles with the need to reach for my phone, but I remind myself not to look. Knowing what’s being said about me—about Hayden and Jarrod and Sly and me—won’t change anything. It will only make me feel worse.

    If something ever happened to Sly, if the ck Widow actually struck again, there’d be noing back from that. Not for my career, and certainly not for me.

    Knowing that is all it takes for me to decide.

    “I can’t,” I choke out, the walls inside me splintering at the thought of everything that could go wrong. So I patch them up, build them higher even as they start to crumble. “I just can’t do it. He’s too famous, too adored. If something happened to him, I’d never—” My voice cracks, but I don’t need to finish the sentence for them to understand. I didn’t even need to start it.

    “Okay, then,” Bianca says, climbing to her feet. “You heard the woman. Let’s try to get this fixed before the concert tonight.”

    But before anyone else can so much as move, my phone buzzes with a text message…from Sly.

    We all stare at his name on my lock screen until Bryan reaches for the phone and holds it out to me.

    I unlock it with trembling hands, and as I pull up my messages, fury, excitement, and sorrow all whirl around inside me.

    Sly: I’m so, so sorry

    The phone lights up again. And again, each one makes me ache a little more.

    Sly: I’d really like to exin what happened

    Sly: Can you talk?

    And just like that, the scaffolding I’ve worked so hard to hold together shatters. Whether or not I’ll shatter with it remains to be seen.