The gala planning took over the fourth floor by the second week, mockups of an anthology cover taped up near Marketing’s desks, a stage layout circulating in three different configurations depending on how dramatic Iris wanted the “unveiling” to feel, a phrase that made my stomach drop a little further every single time someone said it out loud in a meeting like it was just another item on an agenda.
“They want a spotlight moment,” Wren said, scrolling through the latest version of the run-of-show on her monitor, oblivious to the way my whole body had gone rigid at the words.
“Like, an actual spotlight. Iris wants Red to walk out from the wings while the room’s still dark, mic already live, very theatrical. I told her it sounded like a magic show and she said, quote, ‘that’s the point.'”
“That’s a lot of production for someone who’s spent years actively avoiding production.”
“That’s corporate for you. Subtlety dies the second a board gets involved.” She pulled up a mockup of the gala invitation, gold lettering on deep red card stock, an illustrated wolf silhouette curling around the company logo in a way that felt, to me, considerably less decorative than it apparently did to everyone else in the building.
“Iris loves this design, by the way. Says it ‘sets the tone.’ I think it’s a little on the nose, personally, but nobody asked me.”
“It’s very on the nose.”
“Right? Like we’re just doing the fairy tale thing as hard as we possibly can now.” She set it down, oblivious to how thoroughly the wolf on that card had just lodged itself somewhere behind my ribs.
“Anyway, three weeks. Iris wants confirmation a full week before, so really we’re down to two before someone needs an actual name to put on a place card.”
Two weeks.
Not three.
The number landed like a stone dropping somewhere I couldn’t see the bottom of.
“Speaking of Red, by the way,” Wren said.
She kept scrolling, and then, almost as an afterthought, pulled up a different window entirely, one I recognized with a fresh spike of dread before she’d even finished explaining herself.
“I’ve been doing some side research. For fun, mostly. Cross-referencing post times against company calendar invites, just to see if I could narrow down whether he’s actually in our industry, like everyone keeps speculating.”
“Wren—”
“It’s not for Fenrir. I’m not trying to steal your job, don’t worry.” She laughed, easy, unbothered, scrolling through a spreadsheet that looked uncomfortably similar to the one I’d built weeks ago, except built from a much more dangerous angle, because Wren wasn’t constructing a fake lead.
Wren was actually, competently, correctly looking.
“I noticed something weird, though. You want to hear something funny?”
My heart had relocated somewhere around my throat.
“Sure.”
“Every single post that mentions a specific weather event lines up, almost exactly, with something that happened in this city. The ice storm in March. That one heat wave in July, two years back, where he complained about the subway for four hundred words. I started wondering if Red’s actually local, like genuinely local, not just generically urban the way everyone assumes.” She tilted her head at the screen, scrolling further, and I watched, frozen, useless, as her cursor drifted toward a column she’d labeled, with the casual, devastating precision of someone solving a puzzle for fun, posting gaps — possible reasons.
“There’s a gap right here,” she said, tapping the screen, “three days, right around — ” she checked the date against something else, frowning slightly, “—right around when you took that sick day. The one where you came in late and looked like you’d seen a ghost.”
The room went very quiet, or maybe just my whole body did, every sound narrowing down to the specific rushing static of a secret finally, actually, irreversibly arriving at someone’s door.
“Wren.”
Whatever was on my face must have been considerable, because the easy, puzzle-solving delight drained out of her expression all at once, replaced by something slower, more careful, the particular dawning look of someone doing math she desperately didn’t want to finish.
“Clancy,” she said, very quietly.
“What are you not telling me.”
We ended up on the third-floor balcony, the one Fenrir had found me on weeks earlier, because some part of me apparently believed that particular stretch of railing was the only place this building had ever actually allowed me to be honest.
“It’s me,” I said, finally, the words landing strange and small after eleven years of never once saying them out loud to anyone.
“I’m Red. I have been since I was fifteen. The blog, the icon, all of it. It’s mine.”
Wren didn’t say anything for a long moment, just looked at me, processing, her face moving through several distinct stages of disbelief before settling, slowly, into something that looked almost like grief.
“Four years,” she said finally.
“Four years of friendship, Clancy, and you never once—”
“I couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?”
“Both. Either. I don’t know anymore.” I gripped the railing, the cold metal grounding me in a way nothing else currently could.
“I built that account when I was a kid trying to survive losing the only friend I’d ever had. It became the only place I felt like I could say anything true without it costing me something. Telling anyone felt like it would break the only door I had left.”
“I’m not anyone, Clancy. I’m your friend.”
“I know. That’s exactly why it was so hard.” My voice cracked, finally, eleven years of careful control fraying at the edges all at once.
“If I told you and you looked at me differently, I’d lose both things at once — the secret and the friendship. I couldn’t risk it. I told myself that was protecting both of us. I’m starting to think it was just protecting me.”
Wren was quiet a long time, looking out at the street, arms crossed against the cold, and when she finally spoke, her voice had lost most of its earlier sharpness, replaced with something more tired, more careful.
“Does Fenrir know?”
“No.”
“Clancy.” She turned to face me fully, something fierce and worried moving across her features all at once.
“He’s about to put you on a stage in front of investors and journalists and ask Red to walk out of the wings. You understand that, right? You understand what happens if this comes out at the gala instead of from you, in private, on your own terms?”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because right now you’ve got three weeks to tell the man you’re apparently in love with that you’ve been lying to him about the single biggest thing in both of your lives, and instead you’re standing on a balcony telling me, which I appreciate, genuinely, but which does not actually solve the problem.”
“I tried to tell him already. The night after the time capsule. I wrote a whole message and deleted it.”
“Try harder.” It came out sharper than anything she’d said all night, but there was real care underneath the sharpness, the specific frustrated love of a friend who couldn’t stand watching you walk toward a cliff in slow motion. This chapter was copied from novelping.com without permission.
“I’m not going to say anything, Clancy. This is yours to tell, not mine. But I’m telling you, as someone who loves you and is genuinely furious with you in roughly equal measure right now — the longer you wait, the worse this gets. Every single day you don’t tell him is a day you’re choosing the lie over him, even if it doesn’t feel that way from the inside.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying you know and actually do something about it.” She softened, finally, just slightly, reaching out to squeeze my arm once, the same gesture she’d used a dozen times over four years of friendship, except heavier now, weighted with everything that had just changed between us.
“I love you. I’m still mad. Both things are true. Fix this before the gala, Clancy. Please. For both your sakes.”
She left me on the balcony alone, the cold finally getting all the way through my jacket, and I stood there a long time, looking out at the same street I’d looked out at weeks earlier with Fenrir beside me, thinking about how close I’d come, that night, to telling him the truth on a balcony just like this one, and how much harder the truth had gotten to say with every single day I’d let it sit, unspoken, gathering weight.
Beck caught me on my way back inside, no idea yet what had just happened two floors below, and read whatever was left on my face with the same plain, unhurried concern he’d brought to the coffee machine weeks earlier.
“Wren looked upset leaving the elevator,” he said.
“You look worse. What happened?”
“I told her something. Something big. I can’t really talk about it yet, but it’s not about her, and it’s not because of anything she did wrong.”
“Okay.” He didn’t push, which I was endlessly grateful for, just studied me a moment longer, the way he did when he was deciding whether a thing needed words or just presence.
“You know where to find us. Both of us. Whatever this is, you don’t have to carry it alone just because it’s finally moving.”
“Thanks, Beck.”
“Anytime,” he said, and clapped my shoulder once before heading back toward his desk, leaving me standing there with the strange, fragile comfort of being surrounded by people who loved me enough to wait, even when waiting clearly cost them something too.
Fenrir found me at my desk an hour later, oblivious to everything that had just happened two floors up, holding two coffees and the easy, lit-up warmth he’d been carrying around for two weeks straight, ever since a backyard and a rusted metal box had given him back a piece of himself he’d thought was gone for good.
“You look like you’ve had a day,” he said, setting one coffee down in front of me.
“Something like that.”
“Want to talk about it?”
I looked at him — at the careful, hopeful, completely undefended way he was looking back at me, a man who’d spent eleven years building walls of his own and had only just, weeks ago, found the courage to let them come down — and felt the full, crushing weight of exactly how much I still owed him, and exactly how little time I had left to pay it.
“Soon,” I said.
“I promise. Just — not yet. Not today.”
“Okay,” he said, easy, trusting, no suspicion in it at all, and the trust in his voice landed in my chest like something breaking quietly, somewhere I couldn’t reach to fix it.
“Whenever you’re ready. I’m not going anywhere.”
I watched him go back to his office, coffee in hand, humming something under his breath, a man walking back into his day with absolutely no idea that the clock on his entire understanding of his own life had just started, somewhere two floors above his head, its final, irreversible countdown.
Two weeks, I thought, watching his office door close behind him.
Two weeks to find the version of myself brave enough to walk through it before someone else did it for me, on a stage, under a spotlight, in front of a room that would never understand the years it had actually taken to build the courage that moment was going to require.