MY FAKE BOYFRIEND CAN HEAR MY THOUGHTS
Chapter Nine: The Night I Had to Choose Between My Family and My Dream
"Your dream isn't a backup plan," Thomas said, standing in the doorway of my bedroom in a suit clearly meant for a gala neither of us knew how to survive yet, and something about the certainty in his voice made me put down the dress I'd been holding and actually look at him.
That was six hours before the Gala started. First, though, there was the board.
The emergency session convened at Hale Tower at seven that evening, a dozen severe looking adults in a glass conference room I wasn't technically supposed to see, and Elowen and I sat outside it in matching, borrowed chairs while Thomas's grandmother and my own mother disappeared inside to decide, apparently, whether either of our lives still belonged to us.
This is insane. Adults are currently in a room deciding my future and I'm not even allowed to be present for the decision.
Julian was there too, of course, standing near the conference room doors with the specific, satisfied posture of a boy who believed he'd already won something important, a folder tucked under one arm that I had no doubt contained every photograph, every timestamp, every piece of the story he'd spent weeks quietly assembling.
"You look nervous," he said, drifting over to where Elowen and I sat.
"You look like someone who thinks ruining two people's lives counts as a personality," Elowen said, without looking up from her phone, and I felt a small, fierce flicker of pride at the sharp, protective edge in her voice, the first time all week I'd seen her sound genuinely like herself instead of a careful performance of herself.
Julian's expression flickered, something almost like discomfort passing behind his eyes before he recovered his usual composure. "I didn't do this to ruin anyone. I did it because my father's spent three years watching Thomas get handed everything by default, the company, the merger, the freedom to break rules the rest of us get punished for breaking. I just wanted someone to finally notice."
He's not entirely wrong to be angry. He's just aimed all of it at exactly the wrong target.
"That doesn't make it okay," I said quietly. "You didn't just expose a secret, Julian. You put my family's whole life on the table because you wanted someone to notice you."
He didn't have an answer for that right away, and for a moment something almost uncertain crossed his face, quickly buried under the same composed mask his whole family seemed to wear like armor.
"For what it's worth," he said finally, quieter than I'd ever heard him, "I didn't actually want it to go this far. I wanted Thomas to slip up in front of the board once, get a little humbled. I didn't think you'd both actually mean any of it."
"That's the part you got wrong," Elowen said. "You assumed it was still a performance. It stopped being one weeks ago."
Julian looked, for one brief moment, almost young standing there, all his careful strategy stripped down to something closer to a boy who had wanted attention and gotten a war instead.
The conference room doors finally opened then, my mother's face unreadable, Thomas's grandmother's expression giving away even less, and all four of us straightened at once, the argument with Julian swallowed instantly by the far larger one waiting on the other side of that door.
"The board has reached a preliminary position," Thomas's grandmother announced, addressing all four of us at once. "The merger will proceed. The public relationship, however, requires immediate clarification, one way or another, before tomorrow's Gala. I trust the two of you," she said, looking at Thomas and me, "understand exactly what clarification requires."
She means we have to decide, publicly, tomorrow night, whether to tell the truth or bury it deeper than it's already buried.
Thomas found me afterward in the hallway, both of us quiet, both of us clearly turning the same impossible math over in our heads.
"The Hartwell final exhibition is tomorrow night too," I said eventually. "Same time as the Gala. They announce the scholarship in person, in front of the whole committee. If I'm not there, I don't just miss an announcement, I forfeit the whole thing."
Something tightened in Thomas's jaw. "Then you go to the exhibition."
"And leave you to face the Gala, and Julian, and your grandmother's entire board, alone?"
"Hazel." He said my name the way he always did now, careful, deliberate, like it still meant something new to him every time. "I've spent my whole life letting this family's schedule decide what mattered most. I'm not going to be the reason yours does the exact same thing to you."
"You say that like it's simple. It's not simple, Thomas. If this goes badly tonight, it goes badly without me standing next to you."
"I know exactly how it might go," he said, quieter now. "I've had all week to imagine every version of it. None of them change what I think you should do tomorrow."
That was when he said it, standing in my bedroom doorway six hours before the Gala, both of us dressed for an evening that was about to collide with everything we'd both been building separately.
"Your dream isn't a backup plan," he said again, quieter this time. "Go to the exhibition. Win your scholarship. I'll handle the Gala."
"They'll ask where I am."
"Then I'll tell them the truth," he said, and something steady and unafraid settled into his expression, the look of a boy who had finally decided which version of himself he wanted to be in front of an audience. "All of it. Starting with your name."
He's going to do it without me there. He's going to stand in front of his entire family's business and tell the truth alone, so that I don't have to choose between him and something I've wanted my whole life.
"I'm not going to let you do that alone," I said.
"You're not letting me do anything. I'm choosing it."
THOMAS
I have spent seventeen years learning exactly how to want things quietly, in the specific, controlled way my family considers acceptable. A merger closing on schedule. A board vote going the right direction. Nothing so reckless as a girl's scholarship interview mattering more to me than my own family's gala.
Standing in her doorway that evening, watching her try to talk herself out of taking the one thing she'd actually earned honestly, I understood, with a clarity that startled me, that I would rather stand alone in front of every person my family had ever trained me to perform for than watch her give up something that was entirely, uncomplicatedly hers.
He's going to do it without me there. I heard her think it before she said it out loud, that same familiar ache of guilt she always carried too easily, and for once I didn't wait for her to finish deciding how to feel about it.
"Go," I told her. "I mean it. Some debts are worth paying alone."
She went. I watched her drive away from the front steps of my own house with a mixture of terror and something that felt suspiciously like pride, and then I straightened my jacket, and went inside to face a ballroom that had no idea yet how thoroughly its evening was about to change.
HAZEL
I went to the exhibition. I want that on record, because for one whole, terrified hour, sitting in a folding chair in a gallery two towns away from the Gala, watching other students present their portfolios to a panel of judges who held my entire future in a single decision, I thought I had made the wrong choice, that loving someone was supposed to mean staying, not leaving, not trusting him to carry something this heavy without me standing right beside him.
Ms. Alvarez found me in the hallway outside the presentation room, squeezing my shoulder once before I was called in, the same gesture she'd used on nervous freshmen for years. "Whatever happens in there," she said, "you already did the hardest part. You made the work honestly. That's not nothing."
I hope she's right. I hope honesty actually counts for something tonight, in at least one of the two rooms I'm not currently standing in.
The committee called my name. I stood in front of twelve judges and talked about Priya, about cut studio hours, about a girl who'd spent two weeks pretending to be someone else and had somehow found, in the middle of all of it, the most honest work she'd ever made.
They announced the scholarship an hour later. My name, called out loud, in a room full of strangers who had no idea what it had cost me to be standing there at all.
For one full breath, standing at that podium with my portfolio still open on the table beside me, none of the chaos waiting two towns away existed at all.
I didn't get to celebrate. My phone was already buzzing before the applause had fully died down, three missed calls from Milo, one text from Elowen that simply read get to the Gala, now, it's happening, and a video, sent without caption, that I watched with my hands shaking so badly I nearly dropped the phone.
It was Thomas, standing at the Gala's central podium, microphone in hand, addressing a room full of exactly the people his family had spent his whole life training him to perform for.
"Before tonight goes any further," his recorded voice said, steady in a way that made my chest ache, "there's something the board, and everyone in this room, deserves to hear directly from me, rather than from an anonymous account or my cousin's folder of photographs."
The video cut off there, exactly at the worst possible moment, and I was already moving before I'd fully decided to, portfolio case abandoned, car keys in hand, driving faster than I should have across two towns toward a gala I was apparently about to walk into at the exact moment everything either fell apart or finally, completely, came undone in the open.
I broke every speed limit on the county road that night and did not, for once, feel even slightly guilty about it.
I arrived at the edge of the ballroom just as the doors swung open ahead of me, the entire room turned toward the podium, toward Thomas, toward whatever he'd already started saying before I got there, and it was Elowen who spotted me first, grabbing my arm, pulling me forward through the crowd with a fierce, protective grip that told me clearly enough she wasn't about to let me stand at the edge of this any longer.
"You don't get to watch this from the back," she said. "Not this one."
I reached the front of the room just as Thomas's eyes found mine across the crowd, something like relief and terror crossing his face at once, and before he could say another word, before the board or Julian or a single reporter in that room could decide the story for me, I took the microphone from his hand.
"My name," I said, loud enough to carry across the entire, stunned ballroom, "is not Elowen Whitlock."
The room went silent in the particular, total way that only happens right before something irreversible, every phone in the room lifting at once, every board member's expression shifting from polite confusion into something far sharper, and somewhere near the back I caught sight of my own mother's face, pale and frozen, watching her daughter say the one sentence she had spent three weeks specifically forbidding.
There is no taking this back now. Whatever happens after this sentence, it happens in the open, finally, for the first time since the crossroads party where all of this began.