Chapter 6
I thought of all the easy answers.
I could have told them Maya had been my high school rival. I could have repeated every insult. I could have mentioned the message she sent me at two in the morning, her certainty that a man’s attention was worth more than an entire crew’s work.
All of that was true.
And all of it would have fed the ugliest part of the crowd.
Instead, I folded my hands and said, “A crew of over five hundred people worked on this series. The decision wasn’t about my pride. It was about whether all of their work should be held hostage by one person’s ego.”
The room quieted.
I kept going.
“I won’t pretend I’m above anger. I was angry. I still am. But if I turn this into a story about two women fighting over a man, I’d be insulting everyone who stayed and did the work.”
Something shifted in the room then.
Subtle, but real.
A cooling.
A recalibration.
Beside me, Ethan glanced at me once.
Not with surprise.
With approval.
The final question came from the back.
“Is it true,” the reporter asked, “that Ethan Cole joined the project because of Jane?”
I almost smiled.
Because that one, strangely enough, was true.
Not in the way the internet wanted, of course. Not because of some secret affair or a dramatic confession in the rain.
It was because, three years earlier, at a charity reading for a children’s hospital, I had watched an unknown actor stand on a nearly empty stage and perform a scene so quietly, so honestly, that the entire room had forgotten to breathe.
Afterward, I had written his name on the back of my program.
Ethan Cole.
When Director Stone asked if I knew anyone, that name had come back like a hand reaching through time.
So I answered simply, “Yes.”
The room erupted.
I let it.
Some truths didn’t need correction.
The real twist came that night.
After the press conference, just when I thought the storm had finally begun to drift away from me, Director Stone asked me to stay behind.
The venue was mostly empty by then. Staff were stripping microphones from stands, rolling cables, collecting backdrop panels. The lights had dimmed enough that the room suddenly looked smaller, stripped of its spectacle.
Ethan stayed too.
Director Stone held a thin file in his hand.
“There’s something I should have told you earlier,” he said.
A faint unease moved through me.
“What?”
He handed me the file.
Inside was an insurance incident report from two months before filming began.
I read the first paragraph once.
Then again.
A rehearsal studio.
A faulty suspended light.
A near miss.
A junior costume assistant shoved out of the way just in time.
Witness statement attached.
Witness: Ethan Cole.
I looked up.
Ethan’s face did not change.
“Lucas was in the room?” I asked.
“Yes,” Director Stone said.
I turned the page.
Additional note: Mr. Hale instructed staff not to report delay-causing safety concerns during his rehearsal block.
My skin went cold.
“He knew the rig was unstable?”
Director Stone rubbed a hand over his mouth.
“Not exactly. He knew staff had raised concerns and refused to pause. If Ethan hadn’t reacted when he did, that lighting bar would have hit a nineteen-year-old assistant.”
I stared at Ethan.
He spoke at last.
“She still has a scar on her shoulder.”
The room seemed to tilt.
That was why he had agreed so quickly.
Not for me.
Not for the role.
Not even for the script.
For the girl with the scar.
All at once, Lucas’s cruelty rearranged itself in my mind. He was no longer just vain. No longer merely a selfish actor throwing a tantrum. There was something colder underneath. The kind of carelessness that became dangerous because other people kept mistaking it for charm.
“Why wasn’t this public?” I asked.
“Because the assistant begged us not to make her the center of a scandal,” Director Stone said. “She’s young. She was terrified she’d never work again. So legal handled it quietly. Then Lucas’s agency paid, apologized, and pushed him into this project to rehab his image.”
I let out a slow breath.
Rehabilitation.
That was the smell I had sensed around him from the start. Not confidence.
Curation.
“And you still cast him.”
Director Stone looked older in that moment than I had ever seen him.
“We shouldn’t have.”
No one spoke for several seconds.
Then I closed the file.
“What happens now?”
Director Stone’s eyes sharpened.
“That depends on you.”
“On me?”
“The assistant agreed to come forward this afternoon after seeing the reunion clip and the public reaction. Legal can release the report if necessary. But once it’s out, it becomes a spectacle. Her face, her name, her injury. It will follow her for years.”
I understood immediately.
We had the power to finish Lucas.
Maybe permanently.
And the cleanest way to do it would also crush someone smaller on the way down.