Page 91 of Heat Unscripted

The pen turned over in his fingers. The Bram tell, the thing that was too big for his voice to hold alone moving through his hands instead.

“They were wrong.”

The settlement offer was withdrawn on Friday morning. No fanfare, no press release. Just a two-paragraph email from thenetwork’s external counsel to Collinsworth, cc’d to Bram, saying thatin light of recently disclosed information pertaining to the circumstances of the original filing, our client has elected to discontinue the current action pending further review.

Cillian read it aloud at the kitchen table, each syllable as flat as if he were reading signal data. But his free hand found mine under the table and held it. The grip was firm as he finally let himself believe the danger had passed.

Bram sat with his eyes closed, pen capped in his breast pocket, one hand resting on the pad that held the twenty-seven pages of evidence he’d built in a single sitting, the other hand loosely clasping the hand Cillian wasn’t holding. The peppercorn had gone quiet. Not sharp, not warm. Just settled.

Tuck was on the phone in the hallway. His deep voice was warm and easy. It was the voice that made millions of strangers feel like friends. But this call wasn’t to a fan or a journalist.

It was to his mum.

“Yeah,” he was saying, gone soft the way he only went for people he’d known before the cameras. “Yeah, Mum, it’s sorted. The legal thing. It’s done.” A pause. A laugh that sounded like relief in a costume. “No, I’m not on telly. Well. A bit on telly. It’s complicated. I’ll explain at Christmas.”

I stood at the kitchen window. The light fell across where the cream-colored envelope had sat, the original filing, the document that had turned my biology into a weapon. It was gone. Filed in Collinsworth’s records, evidence in a case that would never reach trial.

In its place, nothing. Clean granite. A cup ring from my chamomile mug.

My phone buzzed. Sloane.

Collinsworth is filing the discrimination claim as an independent action. The cross-complaint survives the withdrawal. The network doesn’t get to walk away clean.

I read it twice. Set the phone down. Picked it up again when it buzzed a second time.

And Isobel?—

Three dots appeared and disappeared. Sloane typing and deleting and typing again, which was unusual enough that my stomach tightened.

Your recording is extraordinary. I listened four times. I cried twice, which I’ll deny if asked. Welcome to the right side of the wall.

I set the phone face-down and pressed both palms to the cool granite. Breathed.

My scent rose off my skin, chamomile and honey, unmuted, unmasked, and met the cedar and peppercorn and sandalwood soaked into every surface of the room. Four scents in the same space, holding.

Cillian’s looked up at me. Bram’s eyes opened. Tuck said goodbye to his mum and came back in and stood in the doorway with his phone in his hand, his whole posture loosened, like he’d just told his mother he was fine and actually meant it, for the first time in weeks.

“So,” he said, and the basso profundo filled the room the way it always did, completely, without effort. “What now?”

I looked at the counter where the envelope had been. At the three men whose scents had become part of me. At the monitors and tablets and legal pads and cold coffee cups, a counter-offensive built in a kitchen that smelled like all four of us.

“Now,” I said, and my real voice, the contralto, the one that carried honey and warmth, filled the room. “We build something.”

THIRTY-TWO

Isobel

The camera was Cillian’s idea.

Not the network’s camera, with all the strings that came attached to it. A single Canon C70, matte black, on a tripod in my home studio at a distance he’d checked three times and nudged by tiny increments until the framing settled something in his head that I had no hope of following.

“The depth of field at this focal length holds your face sharp and lets the room go soft behind you,” he said, his fingers easing the lens ring a final fraction. “The viewer sees you. Everything else is just the room you’re in.”

“Translation,” Tuck said from the doorway. He was leaning there with his arms crossed, his cedar scent doing its usual job, the air turned into a fireplace somebody had lit just for me. “You’ll look gorgeous and the mess on your bookshelf won’t show.”

“There’s no mess on my bookshelf.”

“Iz. There are four coffee cups on your bookshelf.”