“Hello, Mr. Frazier.” The brunette flight attendant smiles. “Is there anything I can get you?”

Her hair is the same dark brown color as hers. She has a little more blonde in it, and I much prefer the red in Kristin’s.

My throat goes dry as I see her face, hair, body, and voice in every woman I see. None of them compare to her, and none of them have destroyed me the way she has.

“No, I’m fine.”

Her red lips turn into a seductive smile. “Okay, if you need anything, I’m happy to be of service. My name is Leighanne.”

I smile. “Thanks.” There’s no service I’ll need. All I want is to pass the fuck out and wake up in the future.

It didn’t take long for Tristan to get a plan together. He told me the article is down and that they are working on discrediting Kristin. I didn’t want to know the details. I can’t sit and watch them destroy her. Even though she broke my fucking heart, I hate that I’ll be the one doing the same. For all I know, they’ll paint her as a desperate ex with a vendetta or a broke single mother needing to make a name for herself.

She’s neither of those.

No matter what, I can’t turn off how I feel about her.

My phone pings again, and I go to turn it off, but her name flashes.

Opening it is stupid, but I’ve never claimed to be all that bright.

I sit on the plane, rubbing my forehead as I read the text over and over. The same thoughts continue to circle, leaving me without any answers.

Has the campaign against her started?

Will she hate me and tell the kids that I’m the reason their mother is being attacked?

Will she suffer at my hands?

I picture Aubrey’s little blue eyes and big smile falling because my people are making her mother look like a gold digger. Finn will hate me, but not more than I’ll hate myself.

I text Tristan.

I power off the phone without waiting for a response.

I hate every part of this, but there’s no other explanation I can find. I spent all day going over any possibility as to how this wasn’t her, and I came up short. Even though in my heart, I don’t see how she could be so manipulative and go to such lengths to sell me on it, my head sees the facts. There’s no way to argue with them.

The plane takes off, and I leave behind the woman I love and the life we could’ve had.

“Noah! Let’s go!” The director bangs on my trailer door, and I groan.

My head is pounding, and I have the worst cottonmouth known to man. I’ve spent the last two days drunk as fuck, courtesy of the minibar in my hotel. It’s the only way shit doesn’t hurt so much. I’ve avoided people, sunlight, food, pretty much anything other than vodka.

How the hell I’m going to work today is beyond me. I can barely stand, never mind focus on my lines. I lean back in the chair and close my eyes. If I can just get the spinning to stop, I’ll be good.

The door creaks open. “Mr. Frazier?”

“What?” I bark.

God, I’m being such a prick. This isn’t me. I don’t get drunk, be late, or treat the crew like shit. I’m the guy who makes everyone laugh, look who’s laughing now.

“Sorry to bother you, but Paul is about to lose his mind,” the petite blonde informs me.

“You were called to the set thirty minutes ago, and I was told not to leave here without you.”

“Shit. Okay, give me two, and I’ll be ready.” It’s an effort to keep my tone even.

She nods and exits but probably doesn’t go very far. Time to get it together. I have a job to do, and no one here gives a damn that I’m emotionally spent. All they care about is the movie.

I splash water on my face and chug the coffee sitting on the table.

“Ready?” she asks when I swing the door open.

“Sure.” I’m ready for bed, that’s about it. “What’s your name?”

“Elisa.”

I smile the best I can. “Nice to meet you. So, Elisa, what scene are we filming first?”

She sighs, and I can practically read her thoughts . . . shouldn’t you know this? “It’s the scene where your character, Alexander, meets Autumn’s character, Kiersten at a party.”

My alcohol fog evaporates at the name of my character’s love interest.

“Kiersten? The script read her name as Hailey.”

Again, Elisa gives me a look, telling me I’m clearly a fucking idiot. “You got a revised script in your hotel the day you arrived. Did you not see all the changes?”

I would’ve if I read something other than the Surgeon General’s warning on the back of the bottle. “I’ve had a rough few days. My girlfriend kind of sold me out, I fucked her entire life up by saving my own ass, and I drank enough to forget. I’m clearly not on my game.”

Elisa opens her mouth to say something, but I hear someone shouting at me. “Noah!”

My eyes are definitely playing tricks on me. “Tristan?”

Why the hell is my publicist in France?

“Oh, so you do know who I am? Good to know since you refuse to answer your phone.” He glares at me.

“Can’t answer a phone that’s not turned on.”

He rolls his eyes and then smiles at Elisa. “Honey, can you give me a few minutes with my client?”

Elisa looks at me, and I nod. “Sure. Not like I have a job to do or anything. This will be a new record for people getting fired on set,” she grumbles as she walks away.

“I’ll make sure she’s fine,” Tristan says. “I’ve been calling you nonstop.”

Once I landed in France, I felt no need to talk to anyone. My self-restraint isn’t strong enough not to call her, text her, or get right back on a plane if I heard her voice, so I chose to shut down.

There’s no point in explaining that to him. Tristan doesn’t understand any of my apprehension. He’s pretty much heartless and thinks I should’ve went after her the second I had confirmation that Kristin betrayed me.

Funny thing about love, it makes you a fool who can’t purposely put the other person in pain. I would rather spend the rest of my life miserable than see her suffer for a single second.

“Why are you here?”

“There’s something I need to tell you, and I was instructed that it had to be in person.”

My mind spins worse than it was before, I can’t handle another bomb dropping. If he’s here, this can’t be good. “Just handle whatever it is,” I say and start to walk away. “I’m not in the mood for bad news.”

“Kristin didn’t do it,” Tristan says, and my feet stop moving.

I clench my fists, trying to keep myself steady. I don’t want to hope what I heard is true. There’s a possibility that I might still be drunk and be dreaming this conversation. My stomach twists as I turn to face him. “What?”

“She wasn’t the one who sent that email, Noah. We had the IP address traced, and it didn’t come from her house or yours. It came from someone else.”

Please, let this be real. Please, let this be true.

“Who, then? How do you know any of this?”

“I can’t say much more than that at this point. I need to have plausible deniability in case this gets out. There’s a lot of legalities that she’d prefer me to be in the dark about, but Catherine is one hundred percent sure that it wasn’t Kristin. She wouldn’t give me more than that before demanding I get on a plane and get to you.”

I shake my head while looking at the sky. I want to believe this more than anything. Losing Kristin has been agonizing.

“You’re sure?” I press harder.

“Look, Catherine was ready to do what she had to, but she has proof that there was no way Kristin could have sent it.”

The guilt I feel crumbles on top of me, making it hard to breathe. I didn’t believe her. She told me, begged me to listen to her, and I walked away. Even after I hurt her, she sent a text to tell me she loves me.

I hate myself.

I should’ve stayed, trusted her, and found a way to prove she didn’t write it.

How the hell could I have known, though? All the signs pointed to her, and I just accepted it. Deep down, I never believed it, but I’ve learned that people you love can do horrible things. People I’ve trusted have betrayed me, and I didn’t want to be a fucking fool again.

Too late for that.

“So I was wrong?”

“Yes, we all were.”

No, I was wrong. I’m the person who she needed to trust her. This is on me.

“Goddamn it!” I slam my fist into the wall. “I’m such a fucking idiot. I threw her away so easily.”

Tristan places his hand on my shoulder. “What were you supposed to think, man? You had an article with her name on it, on her blog, sent from her email address. It was more than coincidental.”

“I fucked up, Tristan. I fucked up, and she’s never going to forgive me.”

He blows a heavy breath from his nose. “She’ll see where you were coming from. It was an impossible situation. You did what anyone would’ve done.”

That doesn’t change the fact that I left. I turned my back on her just like people did to me.

“And you think she’ll just forget that I gave up on her that quickly?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I really don’t, but in this industry, you did exactly what you needed to. She has to understand that.”

“You don’t get it. She isn’t in this industry like that.”

“How not? She’s a celebrity blogger, Noah. You do a feature against my recommendation, and fall in love with her, and then, suddenly, something we’ve managed to keep out of the press is leaked after you confide in her? Come on.”

Who cares about the reasons? There’s a right and a wrong, and I chose wrong. I abandoned her when she clung to me, begging me not to go. Maybe I did what was best for my career, but not for us, or her, or my damn heart.

I lean against the wall and let my head fall back, making a loud thump. “Others believed her.” I point out. “Someone else dug deeper.”

Tristan leans against the wall next to me, and my self-loathing grows. I could’ve done whatever necessary to prove she didn’t or really did. It isn’t as if I don’t have the capability, but I saw no other possibilities than it was her.

“Yeah, but you were on the receiving end of the shit-storm. You had to deal with the fallout. I don’t know, I think you were in a no-win situation and you did the best you could.”

Maybe he’s right, but my heart told me she didn’t do this. I never thought she was capable of being that deceitful, it was my head that wouldn’t get on board. Now, I’ve lost her, and I have no idea if I can get her back.

I rub my now-throbbing hand. “Tell me you guys didn’t do anything to ruin her.”

“I was able to discredit the site as fake news, but it’s out there. We held off a bit more than I would’ve, but Kristin is related to Catherine.”

“Catherine your boss? The woman who came to my house is part of her family?”

He raises his hands and drops them. “One and the same. She wanted to leave no stone unturned before we did something to Kristin that we couldn’t take back. Catherine’s husband runs a security company, and . . . well, I was told I don’t want to know more than that. They ruled out her sending it about thirty minutes after you sent me the text from the plane.”

Jesus Christ. For two days I’ve been drinking myself stupid while she’s been sitting there thinking God knows what.

“Does she know that no one has told me until now?”

“I don’t know. We’re skating a really blurry line because, typically, we’d never have any contact with her. With Catherine’s husband being her cousin, it has made handling this a little different.”

None of that matters to me. I told him in the beginning I didn’t want to even make a statement. “I care about her, I don’t care about the lines.”

Tristan chuckles. “I know you don’t, but you’re our client. I’m paid to fix your messes, and family or not, our loyalty is to you, not anyone else.”

“Right.” I run my hand down my face. “I want to know who is behind this. I want them destroyed. I don’t give a fuck what you have to do, but they framed her . . . I’m not holding back this time.”

“Understood,” Tristan says with a smug smile. “I wish I could give you more, but you need to talk to Kristin if you want details.”

Whoever did this is about to have the wrath of Hell brought down on them. I’m going to destroy their world like they did to ours. However, I’ll let Tristan handle that, I have something else that needs to be fixed, and right now, that’s all I care about.

“One more thing,” I say. “There’s about to be another mess you’re going to have to clean up.”

Tristan chuckles. “Yeah, that’s the second reason I’m here. I figured I’d have some work to handle in France.”