Page 7 of Save Your Breath

“Ready to play my favorite game?” Isabella asked.

“Hit me,” I said with a sigh.

Her favorite game was to pitch me two possibilities and then fantasize down each path. When she wasn’t slaying dragons as my publicist, she was writing telenovela-style fan fiction — which meant the woman loved to dream up a story.

“Okay, so, we can ignore Garrett completely, not comment on the article at all, and continue with our normal pressschedule, hoping it doesn’t come up. I’ll do my best to steer interviews away from it and make it clear that if they ask a baiting question that stems from his bullshit, we will have you walk right off set. We’ll release the songs as planned, with ‘Heartbreak Habit’being the first single, and let your fans catapulting you to number one on every streaming platform speak for us.”

I nodded, my throat tight as I listened to the first scenario. It was one we’d played out before. I was good at fielding questions from probing journalists. I was great at ignoring the rumors — like how Garrett insinuated that I’m not over Austin, that I’m so hung up on him, in fact, that I made this whole album about him.

Which was complete horse shit.

Sure, there were a couple songs on the album with slights toward my ex. In particular, the one about how he managed to manipulate me in a way that made me lose myself trying to be what he wanted me to be, what he made me feel like wasright.The title of that track was “Puppeteer” and was one of my favorites.

But it had been over a year since our breakup. I’d had other experiences with fuck boys since him, and I was also writing about experiences my friends and colleagues had gone through — like when Isabella was falling hard in love with a married woman with all the promises of forever rolling off her lover’s lips.

Only for her to eventually call things off, make Isabella feel crazy, and stay with her husband, announcing months later that they were expecting a child.

I’d held my friend’s hand through that, cried with her as her heart broke into a thousand pieces. She let me in, and I went through all of it with her — the pain and disappointment. She knew music was my therapy, so when I’d written the song andplayed it for her, she’d cried and hugged me and told me thank you.

And then immediately told me it was going on the album.

Or like how I’d written “That Kind of Magic”just imagining what my mother must have felt falling in love with my dad in the late eighties and early nineties. Their love was the kind that not even the best movie could illustrate. It was the comfortable, playful love that comes so effortlessly you can’t help but smile and long for it when you’re around them.

The truth was I had plenty of writing inspiration in my life. There were my own lived experiences, the ones being lived around me, and the fictional ones I dreamed up in my head.

If only Austin would speak up for me, if he would use his voice to shut this all down…

That was a far-fetched dream.

If I defended myself, it would just fuel the fire. But ifhemade it clear that we hadn’t spoken since our breakup, that it had been a mutual split and we were both moving on… people would listen.

That was the infuriating truth.

No matter how the times progressed, it seemed a man’s word would always outweigh a woman’s.

Of course, Austinlovedthe attention he got when something like this came out. He was well known and popular on his own, an actor with a long list of blockbusters under his belt. But articles like this one gave him the chance to be coy in interviews and spin his little web of lies in the perfect way to paint the ultimate picture of him being the golden boy who could never do any harm.

And me as the crazy ex-girlfriend.

“Okay,” I finally said. “And the other option?”

“We flip the script.”

I arched a brow at Isabella, leaning back in my seat. “And how do we do that?”

“Simple,” she said. “We spin a different story. What if instead of a scorned woman still hung up on her ex, we show that you’re a healed woman who has moved on. We illustrate that not only are you not still in love with Austin, but you’re too busy having the time of your life with the most incredible man you’ve ever met to eventhinkabout that nepo baby anymore. We could switch up the single releases, go out strong with ‘On the Way to You’ and take control of a narrative that should be ours to tell, anyway.”

I chuckled. “Sounds delightful, but that would require having a boyfriend.”

“What if we took it a step further than that?” Isabella thumbed through her phone before biting her lip and offering it to me, like she was fairly certain I would throw it as soon as the thing was in my hand. “What if he was yourfiancé?”

I snorted out a laugh, but it died in my throat when I saw the image on her screen.

Staring back at me was the cocky, cold smirk of the National Hockey League’s bad boy, his lip freshly bloodied, shirt tangled in a night club bouncer’s fist as he was being thrown out.

The next shot showed him winking at the camera, and chills swept over my thighs at the sight.

Aleksander Suter.