“What the hell could you possibly want?” I say as I answer the phone at five in the morning.

“We have problems.” My publicist clears his throat.

Tristan is about to have problems for calling me this early. I get that he’s nocturnal, but I happen to like my sleep.

Kristin shifts, pulling the covers over her head as I climb out of bed. The last week I’ve either snuck over to her place or met her when Scott had the kids for dinner. Since it’s his weekend, she finally slept at my place, and we christened the fuck out of my condo. I don’t think there’s a surface in here I didn’t lay her on. It was a damn good night.

One that I need way more than a few hours of sleep to recover from.

“What could be the problem?” I rub my eyes as I stumble toward the kitchen.

Coffee is required. I press the button on my Keurig and watch the much-needed caffeine percolate.

“You know that feature I told you not to do?” he asks smugly.

“The one my girlfriend wrote?” I clarify. Not that I’ve done any other features.

He lets out a half laugh. “Noah, you need to read it. I’m already fielding tons of inquiries, and I’m doing my best, but we need to put out a statement.”

Sometimes Tristan is ridiculous. I get that it’s his job to protect my image, but not everything is cynical.

“I’m sure it’s not bad.”

“I’m sending you the link,” he says.

So dramatic he is. Once the cup is done, I grab my coffee and laptop before making my way to the counter. I try not to think about the fact that Kristin’s bare ass was right here while I had her legs over my shoulders, but the mental image is too good to suppress.

“Noah?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I groan.

The link loads and the headline causes my head to spin. Across the top of Celebaholic is the headline: Noah Frazier: Hollywood Heartthrob or Teenage Killer?

My head jerks back, and I blink, waiting for this to be an optical illusion.

There has to be some mistake.

This can’t be what she wrote about.

Not after everything. She wouldn’t do this to me. There’s no way.

I scroll the page, reading Kristin’s name as the author, followed by the story I’ve spent twenty years burying. It’s like a slap in the face.

There in black and white are photos of Tanya and me at prom, and then all the gory details regarding her death. Then the information about how I moved shortly after, changed my name and started a new life.

Everything I told her.

My chest aches with each word I read. This is a dream, a nightmare that I’ll wake up from, it has to be because the woman I love wouldn’t sell me out for a fucking headline.

“Noah?”

“Shut up,” I bark back and read more. When I see the line about being an average Joe, I know it’s her. There’s no other explanation. “I-I—” I stutter, unable to get my words to come out. “She . . . Kristin is here . . . I can’t believe this.”

“I’ll call Catherine and get her there.” Tristan’s voice is full of pity.

“No.” I stop him. “Kristin wouldn’t do this. This is a joke or something.”

He sighs. “I don’t know what to say, but this is a PR nightmare, and I need to get out in front of it. I’ve already called Celebaholic, and I’ll do what I can, but it’s out there, Noah.”

This is what I pay him for, but I can’t believe this is happening. Not after everything she and I have shared. I would know if she was playing some game. It would mean all of this was for nothing.

I think about that night I told her, how she cried for me. There has to be some sort of explanation.

“I need to talk to her first,” I tell him.

“Regardless, I’m on your side, and it’s my job to put this fire out.”

“Do what you have to do, but I’m . . . I don’t fucking know.”

I’m not sure how to deal with the intensity of the betrayal rolling through me. How the hell could she think this would be okay? How could she take something I told her in complete confidence, with complete trust, and post it?

My hand grips the mug, and I start to shake. Nervous energy fills me, and I need to make sense of this. Tanya’s parents received a large sum of money when I got my first big payout as a donation to the scholarship in her name. My lawyers handled it all very quietly with a lot of ironclad rules regarding what they could say about my involvement.

They forgave me many years ago and wouldn’t betray me, would they? I can’t see why, they knew how much I loved her. Her mother was relieved when I told her about Kristin and me. She said it was time I moved on and stopped living in the past.

I start to go down a list of people who never believed it, but why now? Why after all this time? And how the hell would any of them know about Kristin?

At the end of the day, it doesn’t fucking matter, it’s Kristin’s article. It’s her name on that post. I trusted her, loved her, gave her my heart, only to have her destroy me. And for what? Why keep going once she got the information? Why is she in my bed?

I need to talk to her before I lose my goddamn mind.

Each step I take has my heart beating louder. My emotions are all over the place, and it’s impossible to get my thoughts in order.

Placing the laptop on the floor, I sit on the side of the bed, staring at her face, and do my best to ignore the stabbing pain in my chest. My throat constricts as I reach to touch her. Once this happens, there’s no going back, and if I could rewind right now, I would. I’d stay in yesterday and pray that today never happens.

“Kristin?” I gently squeeze her shoulder. “Kristin, wake up.”

She rolls onto her back and smiles when her eyes meet mine. “Hi.”

The way she looks at me breaks me. This isn’t the look of a girl who just fucked my entire career. She’s looking at me like I’m her savior. I need her to give me a reason so I can find a way to fix it.

“Kristin, the article published,” I say.

“Oh? I thought it was posting tomorrow. Did you read it?” She sits up, pulling the sheets over her naked body.

“Did you?”

“Well, yeah, I wrote it.” She shrugs.

“You wrote it?” I ask. “No one else helped you?”

She tilts her head and laughs. “Of course I wrote it, silly. I emailed it to my editor a week ago, and we went over the edits a few days ago. You didn’t like it? I thought . . . I wasn’t sure if you would, but I hoped . . .”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath through my nose. “You thought I’d be okay with this?”

“Noah?” She touches my arm, and I pull back. “Why aren’t you? I don’t . . . you’re angry?”

“You’re damn right I’m angry, Kris. I can’t believe you actually wrote that! How the fuck could you?”

Kristin shifts back and hurt flashes in her eyes. “What the hell was so bad? It’s the truth!”

I get to my feet and grip my head. She can’t be this stupid. I know she isn’t. She knows how much it tore me apart. We sat in her bed as I fucking broke down and cried to her. There was nothing in that night where I said she should write about it.

Unable to hold it in, I turn to her and throw my hands in the air. “I didn’t know I should’ve specified I needed to be off the record when I told you about Tanya!”

“Tanya?” She jerks her head back. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play dumb, Kris. You admitted not two seconds ago to writing the fucking article.”

She gets to her feet, wrapping the sheet around her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t write anything about Tanya.”

I’m not sure if it’s worse that she admitted to it or that she’s suddenly playing stupid. If she were going to sell me out, she could at least stand by it. However, I’m too pissed to say a word to her.

I take the laptop off the floor, open it, and place it on the bed. “Let’s not pretend. Don’t insult me more than you already have.”

Kristin moves to the laptop, and she shakes her head. When her eyes meet mine, they’re filled with fear. “I didn’t write that.”

“No, you already said you did.”

Her lip starts to tremble. “I swear. That’s not what I sent!”

“Is it not what you sent or did you think you had more time before I read it? I can’t fucking believe this. I can’t believe you!”

“Noah—” She steps toward me, but I move back. “Noah, please. I didn’t write that. It’s not my article! I swear! I wrote about your job, the new role you took playing a man who fights for the woman he loves, I talked about how kind you are, and the charities you’re involved in, nothing about Tanya! I would never!”

I grip the side of my head as I feel as if it’ll explode. My God, I’m being ripped apart. I want to believe her, but it’s all there. “How the hell did everything I told you get in there? It has your name on it, Kristin! I haven’t told a soul in twenty years about what happened, and then it’s suddenly on the goddamn internet two weeks later? Tell me,” I step to her. “Tell me how then.”

I’m a rational guy, she says she didn’t do it, then I need to see what she did submit. Because right now, there’s nothing showing me otherwise.

“I’ll show you my email! You can see that I didn’t send it.” Kristin grabs the laptop, but I pull it away.

Right now, I don’t trust anything. I don’t even trust myself. All I want is for what she says to be true. But I can’t let my guard down, I’m weak to her. I have no idea if she’ll delete it or try to cover her tracks. I need to be one hundred percent sure.

“Tell me your password. I’ll look.”

Her breath catches, and she sits beside me. “You seriously think I would do this?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I admit.

She drops her head and sniffs. “I thought we were better than this.”

“Just show me how the article on your blog, with your name and the details from Tanya’s death I told you about, wasn’t you, and I’ll believe you. The last thing I wanted is this, Kristin. All I fucking want is you, and I’m trying to come up with something that makes sense.”

Kristin’s blue eyes meet mine, and I hate seeing the anguish swirling around, but she has to give me something, no matter how small, to hold on to. “Fine, open the email and you’ll see. I didn’t do this to you. I would never do this to you. I love you, Noah.” Her voice breaks at the end, which equally breaks me. “Erica is the editor-in-chief, she could override anything. So, I don’t know, maybe someone told her, and she edited my article.”

I want to be wrong. If this email isn’t there, I’ll grovel at her feet and then destroy the person who did this. She tells me the password, and I load her email. I go to the sent folder, praying to God the email isn’t there.

I scan down and see two emails to Erica. The subject of the most recent one reads: URGENT-Use this for the article.

The email opens, and there’s no hope left.

I look to Kristin, who is standing against the wall. “I guess my story was worth more than what we had. Don’t worry, Kristin, I won’t push you off the ledge like you just did to me. Guess it was my turn to fall.”