The Rival Between Us

Chapter Two

Maya Hart was waiting on the couch when Elena got home, a glass of wine already poured for each of them, because Maya had a gift for knowing exactly when her best friend needed alcohol before being asked.

"How bad?" Maya asked, not looking up from her phone.

"He said 'next question' to my face in front of thirty reporters."

Maya set the phone down. "Okay. That's bad."

"It's fine." Elena dropped her bag by the door and collapsed onto the other end of the couch, accepting the wine glass like a lifeline. "I knew it would be like this. I told myself it would be like this. I just didn't think-"

"That it would actually feel like something," Maya finished.

Elena didn't answer, which was answer enough. She and Maya had been roommates since university, long before Maya became her sister-in-law's best friend and eventually just family in every way that mattered, and there was no version of Elena's life that Maya hadn't witnessed up close - including the version that had loved Roman Volkov so completely it had nearly undone her, and the version that had spent five years pretending she'd built an entirely new personality out of the wreckage.

"You could still ask for a transfer," Maya said carefully.

"I tried. Twice. Apparently my 'insider access' is too valuable to waste on my own emotional wellbeing."

"Your editor sounds like a nightmare."

"My editor is a business realist, which is somehow worse." Elena took a long sip of wine. "It's fine. I'll be professional. I'll ask my questions, I'll write my articles, and I will not think about the fact that he used to know exactly how I take my coffee and now can't be bothered to look at me like I'm a person."

Maya studied her for a moment, the particular assessing look she'd perfected over a decade of friendship, the one that meant she was deciding whether to push or let something go. She pushed.

"You never told me everything," Maya said quietly. "About what happened. I know the outline - you two were together, then you weren't, then you moved to Vancouver for eight months and came back different. But you never told me the real story."

Elena looked at the wine in her glass instead of at her friend. "There's nothing to tell. We wanted different things. He wanted hockey. I wanted-" She stopped. Started again. "It doesn't matter what I wanted. It ended. That's all that matters now."

It wasn't the truth, and they both knew it. But it was the version of the truth Elena had built her entire life around for five years, the load-bearing wall she couldn't risk knocking out even for Maya, even now. Because underneath that wall was a memory she had never told anyone - not the details, not the messages, not the photographs that had looked so damningly real at the time. She had buried all of it so deep that sometimes she almost believed her own careful lie: that she had simply stopped loving him and walked away.

"Okay," Maya said, because she knew when to stop pushing too, and that was one of the reasons Elena loved her. "Well. For what it's worth, you looked incredible today. I saw the clip online. Someone already posted it - 'Roman Volkov ices out ex-girlfriend at press conference,' or something equally tasteful."

Elena groaned and put her face in her hands. "It's already online?"

"Sports Twitter is a cruel and efficient machine, yes."

"Wonderful. That's exactly what I needed. My humiliation, monetized and shared four hundred times before dinner."

"You can hate him all you want," Maya said, refilling both their glasses. "Just stop looking at his mouth when he talks. I saw the clip. You looked at his mouth for a solid three seconds before you asked your question. It's a tell, El."

"I was not looking at his mouth."

"You were absolutely looking at his mouth."

Elena threw a couch cushion at her, and Maya caught it laughing, and for a moment the conversation dissolved into the easy rhythm of two women who had weathered a hundred smaller disasters together and would weather this one too. But later, after Maya had gone to bed and the apartment had gone quiet, Elena sat alone at her kitchen table with her laptop open to a blank document, meant to be the outline for her first feature on the team, and found herself instead scrolling through five-year-old photographs she'd never had the courage to delete.

There he was, laughing at something off camera, one arm slung around her shoulders, both of them sunburned and salt-crusted from a day at the beach that felt like it belonged to different people entirely. There he was asleep on her dorm room floor, exhausted after a game, one hand still curled loosely around hers even in sleep. There he was looking at her the way no one had looked at her since - like she was the only interesting thing in any room he'd ever walked into.

She closed the laptop before she could look at the last photo in the folder, the one from the night everything ended, the one she had never been able to delete and never been able to look at for longer than a second.

If you love him, disappear.

She had believed, at twenty-one, that disappearing was the bravest thing she had ever done. That she was saving him from a scandal that would have destroyed everything he'd worked for. Five years later, sitting in the dark of her own kitchen with wine gone warm in her glass, she was no longer certain that bravery and cowardice weren't sometimes the exact same act, wearing different clothes.

Maya reached over and squeezed her hand. "For what it's worth, I don't think you're crazy for still caring. Five years is a long time to build a wall, but walls like that don't come from nowhere. They come from something that actually mattered."

"It mattered," Elena admitted quietly. "It was the realest thing I'd ever had, before I destroyed it."

"You didn't destroy anything," Maya said firmly. "Something happened. You don't even know what yet. Give yourself the same benefit of the doubt you'd give literally anyone else in your position."

Elena managed a small, tired smile. "When did you get so wise?"

"I've always been this wise. You've just been too busy avoiding your own feelings to notice." Maya stood and stretched, glancing at the clock. "Get some sleep. Tomorrow you get to go be professional and unbothered in front of a man who apparently still remembers how you take your coffee. You're going to need the rest."