Ryan looked like he hadn’t slept in days but still somehow managed to wear that navy button-down like he’d been carved into it by the gods of torment and old money. I wanted to slap him and kiss him and then slap him again and maybe cry a little into his chest while pretending not to care. He pulled me into the hallway with that same look he always wore when the press asked questions he couldn’t legally answer—half warning, half ache, all betrayal.
“You and Jack are starting a business?” he said, and it wasn’t a question. It was a wound. A sentence held together by shock and the tiniest thread of rage he was trying not to let unravel. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
And that was when the goddamn thread broke.
I laughed. Not the cute kind. The dry, cracked, slightly-unhinged, ‘I’m-holding-myse
