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His face had gone past concern to horror, though he relaxed when she met his eyes.

His arms were half-outstretched, and though Poppy hesitated a moment, she then fell into them gratefully, tucking her head against his chest. He’d worn his dragon shirt today, and she started to trace scales, scale after scale after scale, the simple movement helping her to soothe her ragged brain, get back into a placid state of mind, a functional state of mind, a state where her mind could plan what to do next.

Rai stroked her hair gently, pressing an occasional kiss to her temple, and after a bit she laughed.

“Here we are again,” she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking.

“It is a good place to be.” His arms tightened about her.

“Is it?” Poppy leaned back to study his face. “Here I am having a breakdown over stupid shit every thirty seconds. ”

“It is not stupid. Your mother is important.” He smiled, though his eyes still seemed shadowed.

She curled in again. “I’m sorry I freaked. I just…” She huffed her hair out of her face. “One of the more fun relics of my marriage.”

“Your husband.” Rai’s voice was flat. “He told you what to do.”

“Not always in so many words. Usually it was more…” She hunted for a description, failed, tried again.

“I guess you’d call it manipulation. He knew what to say to…

keep me where he wanted me, doing what he wanted me to do.

Putting all of myself into his goals and putting everything that was me in storage. In a cage.”

Rai’s chest rumbled, but he didn’t say anything.

“So this is a thing I have to do. Me. I have to take care of my mom, whatever it takes. And she signed the papers making this my job. She trusts me to take care of it.” Poppy heaved one last deep, calming breath in through the nose, out through the mouth.

“So I’ll file an appeal, and I’ll figure out what and when to tell my mom about it so that it doesn’t make things worse.

It’s important that I…have control over that. ”

“I understand,” Rai murmured. “It is…hard to tell hard things.”

Poppy nodded, rubbing her cheek against him. “Thank you for offering to help, though.”

“When you are ready,” Rai said in a firmer voice. “I am here.”

If I’m ready in the next six—oh god, no, five weeks. “Thank you.”

He stepped back, and Poppy glanced nervously at his face. His eyes were stormy, his brow furrowed, but he was smiling wide, his smile now familiar and comforting, down to the slight crookedness of his canines that somehow made his teeth seem more perfect.

“You were not meant for a cage,” he said fervently. “You were meant to fly free.”

She almost burst into tears again. But no, she was in control of herself now. She didn’t have to cry knowing that she might have escaped Brendan’s cage but the realities of life were still heavy shackles holding her down.

She could pretend to fly for the next five weeks.

“Come on,” she said, putting on the grin she needed to show her mother. “I promised Mom we’d watch a movie before we go back in the studio. You up for The Princess Bride ?”

His eyes lit up. “It is a movie?”

“You’ve never seen it?” She blinked. “But you quoted it at me. You said as you wish. When I asked you out for coffee. ”

“Yes?” He peered at her guardedly. “You had said you wished to meet at nine o’clock before it was one hundred degrees ”—he emphasized the words with smug nods, like he was mansplaining numbers to her—“and I was agreeing it would be so.”

“So that was a natural as you wish ? In the wild?”

His mouth opened and closed a few times before he answered, voice determined. “I have not seen The Princess Bride .”

Poppy felt her cheeks spreading in a real smile. “Oh, this is going to be fun.”

And it was fun…mostly. They brought back two of the couch cushions so they would have somewhere to sit besides the floor, and Rai laughed and gasped and exclaimed with gratifying enthusiasm.

Her mother watched over their discreet cuddling with an expression of sly indulgence—Poppy had made a point of mentioning that Rai wouldn’t be in town long, but that hadn’t kept her mom from taking to him as if he were a brand-new son-in-law, especially after his rescue of Poppy.

It was cozy, and sweet, and almost perfect.

Except for Poppy’s brain.

Because the awful Brendan-words hadn’t gone away. They’d just puddled in her chest, stagnant pools of trauma, and every so often, one would wriggle out and wrap itself around her thoughts, like vampires sucking away her good feelings.

It wasn’t fair to Rai, that the things he said and did were now getting a gross overlay of her past. He was kind, and honest, and somehow pure in his enjoyment of the movie, the food they’d eaten and the coffee and tea her mother had on constant offer.

And her. He enjoyed her in a way that she’d never expected, never imagined was even possible.

And now all it did was remind her of how Brendan had been, once upon a time. How he’d drawn her in, convinced her they were soulmates, sucked her into a morass of lies and pretended adoration until she was too deep to realize she was drowning. Never seeing the red flags until it was too late.

And now it was like she was colorblind. She couldn’t even tell if Rai was exactly what he seemed to be, a perfect short-term lover, or if he was a thousand red flags bundled in a Prince Charming cloak.

Another storm had rolled in while the movie was on, dimming the afternoon light and sending spatters of rain across the windows.

Her mom tutted and fretted before going to fetch garbage bags to protect the couch cushions on the way back to the studio.

Rai went with, offering to wash the dishes, and Poppy had a moment all to herself .

Which only gave the icky thoughts space to crawl up and up, more and more, until she gave in and grabbed her phone, then sat in her mother’s chair.

Her Instagram feed wasn’t what it had once been.

She posted a few times a week, bits of art and snarky quips and photos of the desert or her mom, and a few of her parents’ friends would sometimes like or comment, and she followed some Tucson businesses and a few actors and musicians she liked.

But after realizing she’d been evicted from the publishing industry, she’d made a point of taking herself the rest of the way out.

She’d unfollowed, muted, blocked until the algorithm stopped feeding her reminders of what had been her life, and she tried like hell to keep from poking at that wound.

But sometimes she needed a reminder. And to hell with it. This was one of those times.

She tapped the search icon and typed in Brendan’s author account username.

He hadn’t blocked her, not even when he’d sent her divorce papers. At first she’d thought it was a sign of hope, that maybe he was reasonable after all, and once he realized what Beaumont Book Group had done behind his back, he’d step in and clear the record.

It hadn’t taken her long to realize that it was the opposite. He hadn’t blocked her because he wanted her to watch what happened next.

There had been the snide, backhanded comments about “bad editing fits” and the difficulty of finding a trustworthy team.

Photos of industry events where he invariably had a beautiful woman hanging off his arm—one with long hair, of course.

He’d always pestered Poppy to grow her hair out.

Quotes from glowing reviews set in the custom marketing graphics that had been created for each book.

Those were the ones that hit hardest.

The women didn’t bother Poppy as much as Brendan probably hoped, once she’d gotten through the initial stages of grieving their relationship—once she’d figured out that what she was grieving had never been real.

There had been a week where she’d wondered which of them had been the source of the chlamydia she’d been prescribed antibiotics for after her first checkup in Tucson, but in the end it hadn’t mattered.

Brendan’s unfaithfulness had barely been a drop in the bucket of reasons he sucked.

And the insults to her work—well, she knew they weren’t true. They hurt, sure, but in a dull way. The damage to her professional reputation had been done already, and once the camel’s back was broken, it didn’t matter how much more straw got heaped on top, did it ?

But the reviews… They invariably chose a quote from the book to highlight. Something witty, insightful, poetic. Something that summed up the literary genius that was Brendan Beaumont.

Something that had been massaged into its final shape—against Brendan’s arguments and dismissals and grumbles—by Brendan’s editor-slash-ghostwriter. His dedicated wife, who had thought all along that they were a team, until he’d proven otherwise.

And when Poppy’s purloined, kidnapped words were set in the graphics she had designed, drawn for fucking free off the clock for her life partner, and used to glorify the man who’d stabbed her in the back so thoroughly she was still reeling…

Well, it was enough to make her rage even more than the monsoon outside.

And sometimes, like with a storm, a good rage was what Poppy needed to wash all the dirt and pollution away.

And so she let herself scroll through the news of his upcoming book, just for a bit.

Just long enough to snidely wonder to herself who he’d seduced and groomed into writing his next masterpiece.

If the same person would be doing his cover art and graphics, or if he had a second girl on the line, or if beyond all belief Beaumont Book group was paying someone real money.

Maybe they’d keep using the same graphics, just change the color.

Or maybe he’d use AI for all of it, plug his previous novels into ChatGPT and ask it to spew out chapter after chapter in the style of Brendan Fucking Beaumont. Who even knew?

The good thing was, none of it hurt anymore.

Not his smiling face that she had once loved, not the reminders of his success, not even the knowledge that she’d given almost a decade of her life to someone who hadn’t deserved a second of it.

It didn’t hurt. It just made her angry. And unlike sadness or grief, anger burned itself away.

By the time Rai came back into the living room, his eyes bright and a cushion-filled trash bag in each hand, she felt better. Cleansed. Alive. Ready to move forward.

Because she would be damned if she was going to let Brendan Fucking Beaumont ruin any more of her life, even only inside her head. And she wasn’t going to let his asshole memory ruin her time with Rai, either.

Rai was good. He was good. And he’d already supported her more in her art than Brendan ever had.

And it helped that she and Rai weren’t committed, that they’d already decided just to make this a fun interlude in their lives.

If it turned out Rai was lying to her, that he had a wife back in Brazil or a dozen other lovers, it wouldn’t matter at all, in the long run.

They hadn’t ever discussed exclusivity, and in five weeks he would be gone.

She would miss him. God, she would miss him. But it was for the best. She didn’t have room in her life for falling in love.

Though maybe she should convince him to get on Instagram, so she would have something to rage at later. Just in case she needed it.

Then she’d have everything under control.