BLAKE
The announcement works.
By the next day, sponsors are calling back. "We're satisfied with the transparency," they say. "We're comfortable moving forward."
By the end of the week, the narrative has completely shifted. We're not a scandal anymore. We're a love story. We're the couple that found each other again. We're the proof that second chances exist.
The media loves us.
But I'm realizing something that should have been obvious from the beginning: we've just created a different kind of cage.
The blackmail is over. The photos are gone. The leverage I held over Elle's head has been dissolved. But now there's something worse—now the entire world believes we're in a relationship, and Elle is trapped by that belief in a way that's harder to escape than anything I could have forced
