Chapter 5
For a moment, I thought he might lunge at me.
Instead, Maya moved first.
She snatched the publicist’s phone and stared at the screen, scrolling wildly. Then she opened social media on her own phone. Her expression collapsed in stages—confusion, denial, panic.
Because there it was.
The official cast list.
Ethan Cole as the male lead.
Jane Mercer as the female lead.
No Lucas. No Maya.
No footnote. No apology.
Just absence.
And in this industry, absence was often the fastest obituary.
Maya looked up at me with naked hatred.
“You set me up.”
It was such a childish sentence.
Almost small.
But it cut deeper than Lucas’s shouting, because it carried history.
In her mind, that had always been my role. The plain girl who existed as a background prop until it suited Maya to step forward and take center stage. If I moved differently now, then to her it could only be trickery. It couldn’t be growth. It couldn’t be merit. It couldn’t be a life beyond her.
I met her gaze and felt something inside me go very still.
“No,” I said. “I stopped letting you use me to decorate your victories.”
She threw her drink.
The glass itself missed me.
Ethan moved before I did, one arm sweeping across my shoulders as the amber liquid splashed across his coat and the side of the table.
Someone shouted.
Chairs screeched against the floor.
Maya froze, as if she hadn’t expected the scene to become real after all.
Ethan stepped forward once, shielding me without drama, without flourish.
It was such a simple thing.
A wet coat.
A half turn of the body.
A hand resting lightly at my upper arm.
But for some reason, that was the moment my throat tightened.
Not because it was romantic.
Because it was clean.
No bargaining. No performance. No demand that I first pretend I didn’t need protection in order to deserve it.
Director Stone’s voice cracked across the room.
“Security!”
There was no actual security, of course. This was a hotel reunion, not an awards ceremony. But two of the producers and three startled classmates moved instinctively, stepping between Lucas and our side of the room while another held Maya back as she started shrieking that I had stolen her life, her chance, her man’s role, her future.
Stolen.
The word echoed strangely inside me.
I might have laughed if I hadn’t suddenly felt so tired.
By the time the hotel manager arrived, the room had split into islands of gossip and alarm. Lucas was still shouting about lawsuits. Maya was crying now, mascara streaking under one eye. Director Stone was calmly gathering the scattered papers. Ethan had taken off his soaked coat and draped it over the back of my chair as if the evening were merely inconvenient.
I bent to pick up one of the fallen pages.
Breach of contract.
I smoothed the corner with my thumb and handed it back to Director Stone.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
“For what?”
“For asking for that phone.”
I looked at him.
He gave me a tired smile.
“At the time, I didn’t realize what you were doing.”
“Neither did I,” I admitted.
That was at least partly true.
When Lucas sneered that my offer was beneath his girlfriend, something sharp and old had settled in my chest. I had known, in that moment, that if I kept pleading with men like him, they would keep calling it kindness and keep treating it like weakness.
So I had changed tactics.
Maybe not elegantly.
Maybe not nobly.
But I had changed.
The next morning, after barely three hours of sleep, I woke up to find my face on every entertainment account that mattered.
The reunion clip had leaked, of course.
Not the entire scene.
Just enough.
Maya throwing the drink.
Lucas shouting.
Director Stone standing in black like a funeral bell.
By noon, public opinion had turned so brutally that even I was startled.
Some people mocked Lucas for believing half a million followers made him untouchable. Others praised the production for replacing him. Most, unsurprisingly, were obsessed with Ethan’s secret casting. Edits were already everywhere—slow-motion trailer cuts, comments about chemistry, threads speculating when the switch happened and why.
My phone rang so often I eventually turned it off.
At the press conference, the camera flashes were blinding.
The room smelled like hot lights, velvet curtains, and too many bodies wearing expensive perfume.
I had done press before, but never like this.
Never with this kind of attention—sharp and almost animal, as though the audience sensed blood beneath the glamour.
Ethan sat beside me at the long table. Director Stone stood at the podium.
The first ten questions were about the recasting.
The eleventh was about me.
“Jane,” a reporter called, “there are rumors online that you were the one who pushed for Lucas Hale to be removed. Did personal conflict influence the production’s decision?”
Every camera turned toward me.
I could feel the collective hunger in the room.
They wanted a line.
A knife.
A clean female rivalry they could package and sell before nightfall.