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I closed my eyes.

The room hummed around me. CPU fan. Air vent. My own breathing.

When I opened them, Evan was still there on the monitor. Still too much himself in a frame he had never meant to give anyone.

My email draft to Sandra sat open on the second screen.

Top selects attached.

No surprises.

No complications.

I dragged Frame 187 into a separate local hold folder.

Not the campaign folder.

Not the export queue.

Not a client-delivery path.

I named it: Hold, which was already the problem.

Then I sat there in the blue light, barefoot and furious with myself, and understood with cold, perfect clarity that I had just done the first thing in three years that actually scared me.

The photo itself was not the thing that scared me.

What scared me was that I had seen exactly what it was, known it needed consent or deletion, and still had not let it go.

Chapter twenty-three

Samantha

Silas’s office was exactly what you would expect from a man who measured human beings in leverage and cap space: an immaculate desk, a data dashboard on one wall, and not a personal object in sight.

He had asked to see both of us. Together. Which was the professional equivalent of being called to the principal’s office, except the principal wore a blazer that cost more than my monthly rent and had a coffee mug that said BRAND IS A PROMISE.

Evan sat in the chair to my left. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of his arm through the air between us. We had not spoken since the scrimmage. Since you played well, thanks, and the look that followed, which had contained approximately six weeks’ worth of unspoken conversation.

Silas closed the door.

That was never a good sign. Open doors meant casual. Closed doors meant agenda.

“I’m going to be direct,” he said, settling into his chair with the measured calm of a man who had rehearsed this. “Because I respect both of you, and because being indirect would waste everyone’s time.”

Here it comes.

“A reporter called me yesterday,” Silas said. “Local sports outlet. She asked about, and I’m quoting, ‘the photographer and McKinney.’ By name. She had a source. Someone who saw you together.”

Paramour. Rooftop lights. The city spread out below like a postcard. Evan was sitting across from me in a charcoal Henley, every line of him saying he had come against every instinct he owned because I had asked him to.

Of course, someone had seen us. San Antonio was big enough to feel like a city and small enough to feel like a neighborhood, and neighborhoods talked.

Evan did not react. Not visibly. But I felt the temperature beside me drop two degrees, the cold of a man whose walls had just received a structural alert.

“I haven’t confirmed anything,” Silas continued. “And I won’t. That’s not my job. My job is to manage the optics around this team during the most sensitive contract window we’ve had in years.”

He looked at Evan.