CHAPTER 4

Aria's POV.

The press conference had barely settled into rhythm when I raised my hand, my pen already resting against my notebook like a small weapon I had been sharpening for years.

"Captain Kade," I said, my voice steadier than I felt. "There have been reports of internal tension within the Titans' organization. Has that affected the team's preparation for the finals?"

For a moment, the room seemed to hold its breath alongside me.

Noah's eyes lifted, and for one unbearable second I thought he might actually answer me. Then his gaze slid past my face as though I were simply another body in a room full of strangers, and he turned to a reporter two seats away, answering a question about power play statistics with the kind of practiced ease that made my stomach twist.

He had heard me. I knew he had. The slight tightening at his jaw told me everything his silence refused to.

I kept my expression even, the way I had trained myself to during a hundred smaller humiliations, but I felt the room notice anyway. A rival journalist beside me let out a soft huff of amusement, the kind that didn't need words to sting. Someone else glanced my way and then quickly looked down at their notes, as if pity were something you had to hide before it touched you. I had forgotten how loud silence could be in a crowded room.

I told myself it didn't matter. I told myself I had walked into that arena as a journalist, not as the girl he once loved, and journalists did not flinch when a source refused to look at them. But some humiliations settle deep, quietly, the kind that don't announce themselves until much later, in the dark, when you're alone with your own thoughts and nothing left to distract you from them.

The conference dragged on for another twenty minutes. I asked no more questions. I simply watched him instead, studying the way he answered everyone else with an openness he had denied me, memorizing the practiced calm he wore like armor. It was strange, seeing him like this. Older. Sharper around the edges. Still, somewhere beneath the composure, I could see traces of the boy who used to laugh so easily it embarrassed him.

When the conference finally ended, people rose in a slow wave, gathering their bags and murmuring to each other about deadlines and quotes. I lingered near the back, pretending to review my notes, giving myself a reason to stay a little longer than necessary.

That was when I felt it.

His stare landed on me before I even lifted my head, a weight pressing against my skin the way it used to years ago, back when a single glance from him could make my whole day rearrange itself around him. I turned toward the exit and found him watching me from across the room, his expression unreadable to anyone who hadn't spent two years memorizing every version of his face.

But I had.

And what I saw in that moment nearly stole the air from my lungs. It wasn't indifference. It wasn't the practiced blankness he'd worn all afternoon. It was something rawer, something that looked dangerously close to longing, as if losing me had become the one wound fame could never quite close.

For a single heartbeat, I let myself remember him the way he used to be, sitting cross legged on my apartment floor, laughing at something stupid I said while noodles went cold in his lap. I let myself remember the boy who promised the world would never make him forget the sound of my voice.

Then reality came rushing back, and with it, anger arrived like an old, reliable friend.

He didn't get to look at me like that. Not after everything. Not after the silence that swallowed five years of my life whole.

I broke the eye contact first, forcing myself to gather my things with hands that were far too steady for how hard my heart was pounding. But before I could reach the door, his agent stepped smoothly into my path, blocking the space between us with the practiced grace of a man who had spent years cleaning up messes before they became headlines.

"Miss Vale," Daniel said, his smile as polished as I remembered. "Welcome back to hockey."

Something about the way he said it, so casual, so rehearsed, made my skin crawl in a way I hadn't expected. It was the same voice that had once told me Noah didn't wish to be contacted. The same voice that had convinced me, in the quietest and cruelest way possible, that I had never mattered enough to fight for.

"Mr. Price," I said evenly. "Still doing damage control, I see."

His smile flickered, just barely. "Just being courteous."

"Of course," I said, stepping around him without giving him the satisfaction of a longer response.

As I walked out of the arena into the cool evening air, I told myself the ache in my chest was nothing more than old muscle memory, a reflex from a heart that hadn't yet learned the difference between longing and warning.

But if I was being honest with myself, and I rarely allowed myself that luxury anymore, I knew the truth was more complicated than that.

Noah Kade had looked at me like I was the only unfinished thing in his life.

And despite every promise I had made myself to stay guarded, some small, reckless part of me wanted to know why.

My apartment was quiet in the way only New York apartments could be quiet, which was to say not quiet at all, just a different register of noise. The radiator ticked against the wall. A siren rose and faded somewhere below. I sat at my desk with my laptop open, the cursor blinking at the top of a blank document, and told myself that the ache in my chest was simply exhaustion from the flight and the arena and everything my body had absorbed that day.

I wrote the piece the way I wrote everything now, clean, measured, stripped of anything that could be traced back to feeling. I described the Titans' discipline under playoff pressure, the mounting expectations around their championship run, the mythology that had built itself around Noah Kade over five years until the public no longer saw a man, only a story they wanted to keep telling themselves. I did not mention that he had looked past me when I asked my question. I did not mention the way his eyes had found mine near the exit, or the way my hands had trembled on the subway ride home until I sat on them just to make them stop.

Some things did not belong in an article. Some things barely belonged to me anymore, after all these years of practice keeping them locked away.

I filed the piece just before midnight, closed my laptop, and told myself I would sleep well because I always slept well after finishing something. It was a small lie I told myself often, and most nights it worked.

That night, it didn't get the chance to.

My phone buzzed once against the desk, the sound sharp in the emptied quiet of the apartment. I almost ignored it. Almost let it sit there until morning the way I did with most unknown numbers now, having learned the hard way that not every message deserved my attention. But something about the timing made me reach for it anyway, some old instinct that had never quite gone dormant no matter how hard I tried to bury it.

There was no subject line. No greeting. Just an email from an address that looked like it had been generated specifically to disappear, a string of letters and numbers that meant nothing and everything at once.

Attached was a folder.

I opened it slowly, the way you might open a door in a house you weren't sure was empty. Inside were scanned contracts with names I recognized and some I didn't, payment trails routed through companies I would need hours to untangle, internal memos stamped with dates that seemed to circle back on themselves, and medical documents that made my stomach tighten before I even understood what I was looking at.

At the very bottom of the folder, separate from everything else, was a single line of text.

Ask what Noah Kade has been hiding.

I sat back in my chair and stared at the screen until the words blurred slightly at the edges. Any other night, in any other investigation, I would have felt the particular thrill that came with a lead this substantial landing in my lap unearned. It was the kind of gift that made careers. It was the kind of file that turned quiet reporters into names people whispered in newsrooms.

But I didn't feel that thrill.

Instead, I felt something colder settle into me, the kind of chill I had learned to recognize over the years, the one that came right before a door opened onto something that could not be closed again. Some secrets stayed secrets because uncovering them cost more than anyone was willing to pay. I had learned that the hard way once already, and some part of me, the part still healing from lessons I never asked to learn, understood that this file was not going to be different.

I scrolled further anyway, because I had never once in my life known how to stop once I started.

Near the end of the folder was a photograph, and the moment I saw it, my whole body went still.

It was the same photograph. The one that had ended everything five years ago, the one that had convinced an entire world, including me, that Noah had chosen someone else the very same week I needed him most. Noah standing outside a hotel entrance, his hand near the wrist of a woman in a dark coat, her face turned just enough away from the camera to remain a mystery to everyone who saw it.

I had stared at that photograph so many times in those first devastating weeks that I thought I had memorized every inch of it, every shadow, every detail down to the woman's shoes. I thought there was nothing left in that image that could still surprise me.

I was wrong.

My eyes caught on something small, something I had never noticed before, something the camera had captured almost by accident. A necklace, delicate and gold, resting against the woman's collarbone, half hidden beneath her coat.

I knew that necklace.

I had spent years trying to forget the woman who wore it, and yet here it was, small and glinting and impossible to unsee, pulling a memory forward that I had buried so deep I thought it could never surface again.

My mother's necklace.

The room tilted slightly around me, and I gripped the edge of my desk as though that alone could steady the ground beneath me.

What did it mean that Mother’s necklace was here? Was it really hers? But no matter how much I stared at it, the form did not change.

I studied the photo again. Noah, standing outside a hotel five years ago, his hand wrapped around a woman's wrist. I had looked at this same image a hundred times back then, and had let it break something in me that never quite grew back right. But the necklace… How had I never noticed it till now? Had it been blurred out then?

The necklace was just as I remembered it… Gold, uneven beads, a small red stone at the center. Tacky, if I was being honest. The kind of thing you would find at a flea market in the Village and somehow still pay too much for.

I decided to get a second opinion and texted Simone. “Are you awake?” My text read.

Three bubbles appeared almost instantly, dancing on the screen before fading out and snapping back into view. After a few seconds, her reply dropped.

SIMONE: Girl! Of course, I’m awake. I’ve been worried sick waiting for you to text all day. So? How was your first day back? A few colleagues and I saw the way he ignored you on screen. What an asshole!

She sent a few colorful emotes of the middle finger after that, and I couldn’t help but chuckle lightly at them. Classic Simone. She was probably sitting in her place with her silk bonnet on, ready to throw hands on my behalf.

Then another text popped up: “Are you okay?” Before I could answer, my phone rang. It was Simone. I picked up on the first ring.

“I’m fine, Simone,” I told her before she could get a word in, cutting off whatever fast-talking rant she was about to launch into. “I actually reached out to you because of something else.”

Her response came instantly. “Sure, what’s up?” I could hear the sound of revving engines in the background. As if she were on the road. Was she just returning from work? At this time?

“Where are you?” I asked instead. “Why is it so noisy over there?”

“Uh uh, nice try. Don't try to flip it on me, Aria.” She laughed. “I know all your journalist tricks. You go first.”

I exhaled audibly and rolled my eyes at her response. “Fine.” I braced myself. “Do you remember that gaudy necklace my mother loved to wear? With beads.”

“Oh, yeah. She said it brought her luck,” she replied. “She used to claim it kept the bad vibes away while she spent your dad’s money. I remember it. Why are you bringing that up now?”

Ugh, why did she remind me of that?

I pulled the phone away from my ear and cropped the photo, cutting Noah out of the frame. TThere was no point dragging Simone into my suspicions before I knew what I was looking at. Once the edges were tightly trimmed to show only the glint of gold and blue beadwork against a dark silk fabric, I hit send. “Just sent you a flick,” I said, bringing the phone back to my ear. “Do you recognize the necklace?”

“One sec,” Simone muttered before falling silent. I could almost picture her squinting at her screen. After some time, she spoke again. “Yeah, that's definitely the same necklace.” She confirmed it casually. But my heart sank, and the air left my lungs. So I wasn't imagining it. The necklace really belonged to Mother. Suddenly, Simone gasped. “Hold on, Aria… Isn't this from the picture of the woman Noah cheated on you with?”

Crap. She had recognized it after all.

“I gotta go, Simone. I’ll hit you back later,” I said, my voice dropping an octave as I tried to force a calm, professional tone I absolutely did not feel. “Thanks for checking the photo for me, though. I appreciate it. That was all I needed.”

“Hold up, Aria. Don’t you dare do that to me,” Simone snapped, her voice dropping the loud Brooklyn energy and turning dead serious. “Don't you dare hang up on me. Open up. For real.”

I sighed, rubbing my temples as I stared at the messy printouts on my desk. “Look, I don’t even know what I’m looking at yet. It’s just a bunch of wild theories and guessing games. Once I actually get something solid, I’ll fill you in. I promise.”

“Nah, that’s not what I mean,” Simone chuckled, which threw me off. I heard the sound of a car door slamming echoing through the speaker. “I’m not talking about your feelings. I mean literally open up. Open the front door. We can talk about it right now and figure this mess out together.”

I blinked. “Wait, you’re outside? Like, right now?”

“Yes ma'am,” she teased. “When you went completely ghost on me earlier, I knew something was up. I was already halfway down your street when you sent that text. Now open the door, it’s freezing out here.”

“There’s no way you’re actually here,” I muttered under my breath. She rarely dropped by unannounced. I would usually receive a call, requesting for permission which she had begun to do since… Since I lost my child. Then she would ask what to bring for her visitation. If she was here, without doing all that, she must have been really worried.

I got up off the bed and walked to my front door, phone still pressed to my ear like I needed the confirmation of her voice and the sight of her at the same time. I pulled the door open.

There she was. Simone Jackson, in a leather jacket over silk pajama pants, box braids piled high on her head, grinning at me like she hadn't just crashed my breakdown at eleven at night.

“Hey, babe,” she said, waving with the hand not holding her phone, then finally lowering it and ending the call on her end. Mine buzzed once in my hand to confirm it.