Good instincts, Stella, but not good enough. I should run, but instead I walk on heavy legs to his office.

Heath’s puffy eyes stare me down, waiting for me to break the silence. I clamp my lips shut against this interview tactic, my brain in overdrive to still every nervous tic or poker tell.

Heath holds all the cards and he knows it.

“You had an interesting night last night,” he begins, his voice low but threatening. I just nod. “Looks like you were pretty cozy with Tattoo Thief.”

He pushes a copy of the New York Post across his desk, open to a page with a photo of Tyler and me. Tyler’s head is bent, his lips graze my ear, and my smile is wide and convincing. I remember he was whispering courage to me, but from this picture and its suggestive caption, it looks like we’re on the verge of getting a room.

Heath waits for me to say something, so I start with a pale shade of the truth. “I, ah, have gotten to know the band better.”

“Bullshit!” Heath pounds his fist on the desk and I jump in fear and surprise. “You know what this picture tells me? It says you’ve had the kind of access any normal reporter would kill for, and you threw it away on a fling with the bassist.”

“I used that access,” I counter. “I gave you three stories on the band.”

“Two. One was crap. And what are you, their PR gal? If you’re spreading your legs for someone in the band and missing a story this big, you can’t be trusted. Especially not now that we’ve been scooped on the Kim Archer angle.”

I open my mouth to respond, reeling from “the Kim Archer angle.” I have no idea what came out in the media last night while Tyler and I were cocooned in his loft.

“Your last piece was fluff—a real reporter would have brought me that.” Heath stabs his finger on a photo of Kim Archer and her baby, both clad in ethereal white. They’re a stark counterpoint to the image of me in a glittering black dress with Tyler. I look like the evil other woman.

Heath narrows his eyes. “Or didn’t you know?”

I shake my head. I did know, but barely. Tyler didn’t tell me enough to write a real story, and even if he had, he confided in me, not a reporter.

“You could have filed a story last night,” Heath huffs. “You were there in the middle of the action.”

I quake. Heath’s right—I dropped the ball completely. When Kim released details to the media, I was so entwined with Tyler, so caught up in protecting him, that it never occurred to me to report the story. It would be like hanging my boyfriend’s dirty laundry out in public view.

Boyfriend? No. All I have are weak assurances of “not a fling.” He wants to know my secrets, yet he never trusted me with his until they went live on TMZ. I burn from the admission.

“What do you want me to do?” I whisper, fearing the answer. There’s no way I can offer Tyler’s story up like a sacrifice to appease Heath. Besides, the news cycle is already running with it. I’d be last in line.

“Nothing.” Heath’s face is pinched. “There are a thousand young writers who’d love an insider’s view of the New York music scene. HR is probably done packing up your desk by now. You’re fired.”

Heath swivels his chair and turns back to his computer monitor, dismissing me. I stand on shaky legs and walk to my desk where a banker’s box holds a few of my favorite coffee mugs, silly desk toys, and a bunch of press badges on lanyards from past events. My Indie Voice-issued laptop is gone.

This is all I have to show for this job? A couple hundred bylines, a brown box of worthless crap, and no thanks for the ridiculous hours I’ve put in over the past year? The gravity of what I’ve chosen—Tyler over my career—sinks in.

All I wanted to do was write a story that mattered. Not a story full of speculation and lies. I wanted to write about art, not gossip. But that’s what I would’ve had to trade to keep working here.

I want to believe I made the right choice. The only choice. I don’t want to turn into a slimy user like Heath.

Fuck it. I’m glad he fired me. I look around the newsroom and the rest of the reporters are hushed, heads down and just a few keystrokes filtering through the silence. Normally it’s louder than a cocktail party in here, everyone on the phone or shouting edits or razzing each other. But nobody cares enough about me to offer a word of condolence or a farewell.

Anger shoots through my veins and I reach in the banker’s box and pull out a fat black mug with I heart NY printed on the side. I pull back my arm and fling it as hard as I can at the wall outside Heath’s door.

“Fuck you!” I scream as the mug explodes and shards fly. “Fuck your fucking gossip rag!”

I grab another mug printed with a Mike Wallace quote: If there is anything that is important to a reporter, it is integrity. It’s credibility.

What a joke.

Heath appears in his doorway and I hurl the mug. It shatters on the wall inches from his head. He rears back from the doorframe with a yelp, his eyes wide.

“Fuck your stories that don’t matter! Fuck stealing secrets! This is not what I signed up for!”

“Stella! Get out of here!” Neil hisses, then ducks behind a cubicle partition in case I turn on him, too.

But I’m all out of mad. I leave the banker’s box with the rest of my mugs and badges, grab my purse from its hook, and storm out of the newsroom. I jab my finger on the elevator button and pray I can escape the building before security gets its act together.

I’m in luck. I push through the revolving door and the morning heat nearly flattens me on the sidewalk. I want to cry, I want to call Tyler and beg him to make it all better, but I can’t do that to him again. I get into one disaster after another and he keeps rescuing me.

A thick slice of pride makes me want to nurse my wounds and hide for a while. So I go to a bar.

Comforting. I order two shots of vodka and then a beer, just to have a drink to babysit while I’m thinking. It’s early and the bar is fairly empty except for a handful of solitary drinkers and a group of men I assume are just off the night shift.

I scroll through news articles on my phone and the horror of what’s happening to Tyler finally sinks in. Dirty details of his life are laid bare in an exclusive, tell-all piece featuring Kim Archer in Us Weekly, with the rest of the gossip and entertainment media parroting the juiciest bits of that interview.

Right about the same time I moved to New York a year ago, Tyler had an affair with Kim, an ex-model turned real estate agent. He was twenty-four. She was twenty-eight. In the interview, she describes in excruciating detail how close they were. She claims Tyler pursued her, romanced her, charmed her. She says she couldn’t help but fall for him.

It didn’t last long—they were only photographed together at two public appearances, but quotes from her back then appeared in a few gossip sources where she claimed they were “made for each other” and hinted that things were “getting serious fast.”

My gut burns with jealousy but I’m relieved that Tyler didn’t make similar statements to the press.

I order another shot and read the rest of the story—their fallout, in which Kim says Tyler suddenly disappeared, and then her realization that she was pregnant.

I zoom in on the photos of Kim Archer’s three-month-old daughter Isla. The baby girl is breathtaking, with fine strands of dark hair like Tyler’s and bright, blue-gray eyes. Kim clutches her proudly, and the caption is sickening: “All I want is for Tyler Walsh to take responsibility for our baby girl.”

Kim is dressed in a thin white blouse, her big blonde hair and long lashes looking wholesome and gorgeous and believable. Is it possible she’s telling the truth? Or is she just trying to shake Tyler down for money?

Deep in the article Kim reveals that she went to the media after repeated attempts to “make things right” with Tyler, which I think might be code for the behind-the-scenes legal wrangling to extract money from him.

I stow my phone and order another shot. My brain is cloudy with vodka, replacing the adrenaline that spurted through my veins during my coffee mug attack on Heath. Throwing stuff at Heath is even starting to seem kind of reasonable. The bastard got less than he deserved.

A morning show is on the TV over the bar and I see a woman’s picture in a box over the presenter’s shoulder. Fuck. Kim Archer is following me. The anchor throws it to tape and Tyler and I are on screen, smiling plastic smiles at the premiere, pretending like everything’s OK.

I call for another shot and the bartender hesitates but then pours it for me. When I slam it down, he ventures, “You look pretty upset. You want someone to talk to?”

“No.” My answer is too harsh and he shrugs and turns back to unloading glasses from a tray. It’s a lie. I want desperately for someone to talk to who can make it all better.

I scroll through my phone contacts and try to focus on the too-bright display in this dark bar, wishing I could call Beryl. But I don’t want her to see me like this. I’m afraid she’d tell Gavin. I’m afraid he’d tell Tyler.

I keep scrolling. The shots have my head spinning and I’m sure Tyler will be angry that I reneged on my promise to stop drinking, so I bypass his name.

Violet. Her name is nearly last in my contacts and I touch the letters before I overthink it. She answers on the third ring, her voice soft and timid.

“Stella?”

I fucking hate caller ID. “Yeah. Hi. You want to come get wasted with me?”