"Oh my God, I’m so nervous!”

Kari was practically hopping from foot to foot beside me as she waited for us to be led onto the set to start our shoot for the day. I touched her shoulder gently, trying to get her to stop dancing on the spot. She seemed soothed, at least for a moment, and came to a halt.

"I’m going to make such an ass of myself," she fretted. "What if I just forget how to speak or something? What if I—"

"Kari," I cut her off before she could freak herself out any further. "You need to take a breath, alright? You’re going to be just fine. Trust me."

"You promise?” she asked, and I smiled and nodded at her.

"Promise."

"Alright, Morgan and Kari, we need you out on set in the next thirty seconds," a woman with a mic and headphones called in our direction. I squeezed Kari’s hand gently, letting her know I was here for her. And then, at last, we headed out onto the stage.

These places were always so bright – probably to make sure that the audience didn’t get too close of a look at the hosts they were meant to be watching. I had never been on this particular show before, but the man and woman running the show seemed about standard-issue for what you got when it came to stuff like this – overly made-up, a little older than they probably would like their audience to know about, and with big, plastic smiles slapped on, even during the ad breaks.

"You alright?" I asked Kari as we sank into the seats opposite them. She looked a little wobbly, as though she might keel over on her feet at any second.

"Yeah, I’m good," she replied, but she was shushed loudly by one of the floor staff. She clasped her hands in her lap and took a deep breath as the floor manager counted down to us being live on air once again. I smiled at her just as we flicked back on to live, and she managed to return it.

"Welcome back to Afternoon Snack!” the woman announced brightly to the camera. Just a moment before, she had been gazing off into space, looking as though she was considering what she was going to have for dinner that evening, but now, she was back in full force. It was a little startling, seeing the difference between the two versions of herself, but I supposed I shouldn’t be too surprised by it – I was an actor, after all.

"And this afternoon, we’re joined by Kari and Morgan," the man picked up. I knew I should know their names, but they had slipped my mind. I glanced around the studio, looking for something branded with their names on it, and came up with a flat nothing. Damn. I would just have to hope that Kari had done a better job than me on actually taking all of this in and let her lead by example.

"Morgan, I’m sure most of our viewers know who you are," the woman – Amber? Amber sounded right – turned her attention to me, that megawatt smile aimed in my direction. "Would you like to tell us a little about why you’re here with us today?”

"Actually, I think Kari is better suited to tell you about the project we’re working on together," I replied, glancing over at Kari. She flashed me a slightly panicked look but managed to compose herself enough to turn her attention back to Amber.

"Yes," she began, her voice trembling a little – but she was holding it together. "I’ve been working – running…I’ve been running the charity for about ten years now..."

And with that, she was off. She spoke well on the charity, passionately, the kind of expression that PR people would have paid a fortune for in pure sincerity. She told Amber about the drive for presents, about my work in publicizing the charity, and about what they hoped to achieve this year with their output. As she went on, she became more and more confident, the words coming smoother and faster until it just sounded like she was on the other end of a business meeting. I interjected where I thought was appropriate, but I let her take the lead. For her first time on a talk show, she was doing a great job – my first time, I’d had a little too much to drink and had wound up uploaded to social media as a sideshow amusement that weekend.

But she was perfectly in control, and I could see that this was coming easy to her now that she had gotten on a roll. I was actually proud of her. It was strange – I couldn’t remember the last time I had looked at someone pulling something out of the bag and felt anything other than mild jealousy, but I was pleased to see her so totally calm and in control of the situation. This would be wonderful PR for the charity, reaching a wider audience than anything they had done before. I was just glad I could pull a few strings to make it happen for her. There wasn’t much I wouldn’t have done to help her out.

"Well, Kari, that’s just fantastic," Amber nodded, and I could tell from the tone of her voice that we were about to move on to something else entirely. I shifted in my seat, ready to make a break for it as soon as she made the transition into an ad break or a human interest story. But instead, she turned her attention on to me.

"But obviously, Morgan, there’s a bigger reason you’ve chosen to get involved with this cause," she remarked to me. I froze on the spot. Amber was playing it cool, but her eyes were shining, and I could tell that she sensed she was on the brink of breaking something big.

"I’m very passionate about the project," I replied, trying to keep my tone neutral. But Amber was far from done with me yet.

"But there’s more to this, isn’t there?” she continued, leaning in. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I had taken a look over the questions before I had come in here, and all of them had pretty much been covered at this point. I couldn’t figure this out.

"I’m not sure what you’re asking," I admitted, laughing it off, hoping that it was just some bit of conversational connective tissue that I’d missed by drifting off for a moment. She narrowed her eyes at me.

"You’re passionate about providing a safe environment for these children because you were abused as a child," she told me. "Isn’t that correct?"

As soon as the words came out of her mouth, everything froze to silence. I couldn’t think about anything else, couldn’t listen to anything. The mumbles of the floor-staff faded to obscurity in my ears. There was no way in hell she could have asked what I thought she had just asked, had she? I must have misheard her. I managed a smile, leaning forward.

"Sorry, could you repeat the question?”

"You were abused as a child," she repeated calmly. The man beside her was giving me a hard look, as though he was waiting for me to crack and come out with it. I couldn’t deal with this. She couldn’t be asking me that.

"I don’t know what you’re talking about," I finally managed to get the words out. It wasn’t much, but it was something. I could just get up, get out of here, hit the road, and do some press conference about what a dirty liar this woman was and how they’d had me confused with another guest or something. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to sell that, but I would find a way.

Someone must have told them. But the only person I had admitted it to was Kari. I glanced over at her. She was looking at me with a horrified expression on her face. Guilt? Was it guilt? I was so angry, I wanted to tear lumps out of this couch and hurl the giant screen with their grinning faces on it through a wall. The studio was completely silent, as though everyone was waiting for me to respond.

"If we could keep this focused on the charity—"

I did my best to turn the conversation back to what we were actually here to discuss, but she wasn’t having any of it.

"We’re curious, Morgan, to understand what your motivation is for getting involved in something like this," she continued smoothly, as though she had rehearsed this in front of a mirror a few times before she had come out to say it to my face. That thought infuriated me. How long had they been planning this?

"As we all know, you’ve had plenty of trouble with your reputation over the years," she remarked. "And with your personal life. Is this some way to redeem that? A chance for you to make right what went so wrong in your childhood?”

"I really don’t feel comfortable—"

"We’re just trying to get to the truth of this, Morgan," she continued. Her persistent use of my name flared a circuit in my head. It was like she was trying to pretend that she actually knew me, that she understood me, that all of this wasn’t just for views and controversy.

"Perhaps you think your abuse makes it alright for you to act out," she pressed. "Maybe you think that the world owes you for the way you were treated, and now you have the right to lash back at everyone around you?”

"What the hell are you talking about?" I snarled back at her. I knew I wasn’t helping my case, but I didn’t care. How dare she just come in here and act like she fucking understood anything about me? In what world was it alright to air dirty laundry like this on some shitty daytime talk show, with no warning that it was going to come up at all?

"I think you know," she replied, her voice faux-soft, like she was trying to convince me that everything was going to be just fine. But it wasn’t. This woman – this show – had just exposed all of the secrets I had been trying to keep to myself for so long. I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs, to shove over the table, to storm out, but I felt as though I was stuck to the couch. I hated this. I wanted to leave, but I felt helpless. Kari was there next to me, but she might as well have been a million miles away for how alone I felt at that moment.

"Morgan, can we get an answer from you?” Amber pushed me. And with that, I finally felt something in me give.

"That is none of your fucking business," I shot back. I knew that I would get chewed out for cursing, but I couldn’t have given less of a shit. Everything that I had tried to keep to myself was on the line now, about to be exposed, and none of it was something I could keep from reacting to. I felt like I had with Kari in that car – exposed and torn open – except this was happening on a much bigger scale, and I had no control over how it went out to the world.

"This is a disgusting invasion of privacy," I continued, my voice low, reaching for the microphone that was pinned to my lapel and tearing it off. I didn’t want it anywhere near me anymore. If they thought they could just use me like this – just expose me because their shitty little show needed better ratings – they had another damn thing coming.

"Where the hell did you get this information, anyway?” I demanded, glaring at her furiously. She shifted in her seat and for the first time actually had the good sense to look a little embarrassed at what she was doing for views.

"We received the information from an anonymous source," she replied coolly. They hadn’t expected this reaction from me – that much was obvious. But how could they not have? They were dumping this on me out of nowhere; they couldn’t have expected me to just sit there and take it.

"I’m leaving," I told her as I got to my feet and tossed the microphone down on my seat. Everyone in the studio was silent as I turned and stormed off of the set. I wasn’t going to spend another fucking second here, not for a moment. I hated this. I hated them. I hated Kari because she had to have been the one who’d told them. Nobody else knew. She must have been the one to expose me to someone. But why? Who? When?

I strode out through the studio, not looking back for a moment. Nobody stopped me. I guess, in that way, my reputation was a helping hand, since they probably thought I would freak out and attack them if they came too close to me. And honestly, yes, I wasn’t sure that I had it in me to contain myself after what they had just done to me.

I made it outside and gulped in a huge breath of air. Now that I was back in the real world, the weight of what had happened was tumbling down on top of me so fast, I could hardly keep up with it. This was insane. How could they have done this? How much had Kari known? How could she have figured out that we were going to come on this show and made sure that they knew what to ask me? I had only gotten the call from them the day before, and I had assumed it was about the charity because it was getting closer to Christmas. But clearly, they’d had something else in mind for my tenure on the show. Something much darker.

I heard footsteps behind me and turned, ready to chew out whatever hapless studio staff member had been sent out to bring me back to finish the interview. But instead, I found Kari chasing after me, her microphone ripped off, her eyes wide, and her face written with panic.

"Morgan—"

"I’m out of here," I snapped at her. I had driven over to the lot myself earlier, and I had every intention of driving myself the hell back out of it now that they had revealed what they actually had planned for me. This was such spectacular bullshit – to think, I had imagined that this would be good for my reputation, not something that would dismantle it entirely. It would already be trending on social media, think pieces being typed out as I stood there. None of this was fair. None of this had been theirs to share. It had all belonged to me, and that was what made me the angriest.

"Let me come with you," she protested, following closely behind me as I headed to the lot where I had parked my car.

"No," I shot back, furious. "Why would I do that when you’re the one who told them this?”

"Morgan, I would never—"

"I didn’t tell anyone for years and years, and I tell you, and ten days later some shitty talk-show host is out here asking me about it?" I fired back, turning on her, stopping in my tracks so fast she almost crashed straight into me. She opened and closed her mouth. There was pain in her eyes, but it could easily just have been guilt for what she knew she had done to me.

"I don’t know where the hell you get off on doing something like this," I continued. There were a few people passing by from lot to lot, but they didn’t stop to listen in – they had probably seen the interview, probably knew that I was on the brink of exploding anyway. I just needed an excuse, and I would go off on the next person who looked at me sideways. One fucking wrong move from anyone in a twenty-foot vicinity, and I would have to be taken out of this place in a police car.

"I told you something that I had never so much as thought about sharing with anyone before," I continued, the words pouring out of me, all of the anger and the hurt I felt bursting forth. I couldn’t control it. I didn’t want to. She had betrayed me; she deserved everything she was getting from me right now.

"Please, listen to me," she begged, but I was done with listening to other people. What had landed me in this in the first place? My agent, telling me that I needed to sort out my reputation. If I had told her where to get off, none of this would have happened. I needed to take control of my own fate again and not let anyone else near me. As if it weren’t already too late for that.

"You did this after I left that night, didn’t you?” I demanded, the pieces suddenly falling together in my head, as though they should have been obvious all along. "When I was around at your place and I left suddenly."

"Morgan, I would never—"

"Look, Kari, I really thought things were different with you," I cut her off. "I never felt the way I did with you with anyone else, you know? When I was with you, it felt like something new. Like something better."

She didn’t reply. She couldn’t. I ran my hands through my hair and continued.

"Listen, before I met you, I didn’t think I could do any of that family shit," I confessed. I had already told her enough now; I might as well keep going, right? Plus, I knew that this would hurt her – I understood that I was just lashing out because she had hurt me, but that didn’t matter at the moment. All that I gave a damn about was making her feel as bad as I did in that second. Ripped open. Like the entire world could see the most vulnerable parts of her.

"I didn’t think I wanted kids, didn’t think I wanted a family, didn’t think it was a good idea for me to even go there," I continued, lowering my voice to make sure nobody else could hear us. I wanted these words to be only for her, wanted them to pierce into her the way that the words Amber had spoken to me just had.

"But then when I was with you, I felt – shit, I felt like there might actually be a chance in hell," I continued. "When I spent that evening with you, I thought I could do it. I really believed that I would be able to make this happen. Not easily, sure, but I thought I could try it, and I thought that as long as you were there with me, I could find a way."

She stared at me, her mouth slightly open as though she couldn’t make sense of what I was saying to her. I knew this was cruel; I knew I was just lashing out, but how could I not? What had just happened in there had changed everything. The man that she had known before wasn’t here any longer. He had been replaced by someone who had just had everything he had tried to keep to himself exposed on live television, and he could be forgiven if he didn’t want to be around anyone at that particular moment.

"Morgan," she finally replied, reaching out to grab my hand. I didn’t pull away at once. Even in the midst of all of this, her touch was soothing to me, calming, and I couldn’t help but crave more of it.

"Morgan, I had nothing to do with this," she continued desperately. I looked down at her – I couldn’t believe her, even if I’d wanted to. This had to have been her. Nothing else made any sense. She was the only one who knew, the only one who knew and could have exposed me as brutally as this. I didn’t know why she’d thought she had to do this to me, but she’d obviously made the decision, and now, both of us were fucked.

I pulled my hand away from hers, shaking my head.

"I need to get out of here," I muttered, turning away from her. She followed me once more.

"Please, can we just talk about this?” she implored, her voice aching with sadness and confusion. I turned to her and looked her dead in the eye to make sure there was no room for any misunderstanding any longer.

"I don’t want anything to do with you anymore," I told her firmly. "I want you to go. I should never have trusted you in the first place."

And with that, I headed to my car, marching toward my escape from this place. As I climbed in, I shot one more look over my shoulder and saw Kari standing there at the other end of the parking lot, with tears streaming down her face. I didn’t feel triumph at seeing her that hurt. It didn’t take away from what had just happened to me. But it was something, at least. Something to remind me that I wasn’t the only one hurting right now.

And with that, I climbed into the car and took off, hoping to God that I could leave this entire mess of a day behind me once and for all. But I had a grim feeling that it wasn’t going to be that easy. Leaving Kari behind, leaving behind everything she’d brought into my life? Yeah, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to shake her just like that. Because even after all that had happened, I didn’t truly want to.