Chapter 7 — Who Is Ethan's Date?
It was already seven when Alex got back to the hotel, and she was surprised to find Fidelia there waiting instead of out chasing some new distraction the way she usually did on a free evening.
"You're home! Finally!" Fidelia practically dragged her to the couch. "Tell me everything, and I mean everything."
"We had hotpot. Really good, actually — we should go back." Alex sat down, unable to keep a small smile off her face.
"I did not sit here for an hour to hear about soup." Fidelia crossed her arms. "You went on your first date with a man. Even if it's fake, it's still the first time you've been alone with one. Talk."
"Nothing happened. We just talked. He's gentler than I expected. I told him about my condition, we talked about ourselves a bit — if we're supposed to be a couple in front of people, we should probably know something real about each other."
"You told him about your condition?" Fidelia's mouth fell open. "I waited years for you to bring that up with me on your own, and you're telling a man you met yesterday?"
"He didn't ask why. I would have told him if he had. It was strange — I just felt comfortable with him." Alex turned the thought over again, still a little baffled by it herself. She never handed pieces of herself over this easily, not to people she barely knew.
Fidelia studied her for a long moment, something softening behind the shock. Alex had always kept her guard up, had always been the one accused of being cold or distant by people who didn't understand what that guard was protecting. Watching her lower it, even slightly, for anyone was rare enough to notice.
"It's not like you," Fidelia said finally. "But I'm glad. It's not healthy, carrying everything alone all the time. And I'm even happier it's a man you're comfortable with."
She meant it, too — the words carried none of her usual teasing lightness. In all the years they'd shared an apartment, shared a career, shared nearly everything two people could share without being related, Fidelia had never once managed to get Alex to open up about her condition beyond the barest facts. Watching her do it for a near-stranger, and so easily, felt less like betrayal and more like the first real evidence that something in Alex might actually be capable of healing.
"Speaking of not like you," Alex said, deflecting with a smile, twisting a strand of hair around one finger, "since when do you stay in on a free night instead of chasing your destiny?"
Fidelia burst out laughing. "I already have my destiny's number in my phone, baby girl. I'm just waiting for the call. And trust me — it's coming."
"You say that about all of them."
"And I'm usually right, aren't I?" Fidelia shot back, entirely unbothered by the accusation. "Some of them just take longer to realize what they're missing."
Once the conversation wound down, Alex went to shower, and Fidelia, ever the dutiful agent even after hours, opened Alex's accounts to check the damage. She didn't have to look far. The first article that loaded read Ethan's Secret Date, followed quickly by Who Is the Mystery Woman Ethan Was Seen With? The comment sections had exploded — fans theorizing, dissecting every visible inch of the masked woman in the photos, demanding answers Royalstar clearly had no intention of giving yet.
"Baby girl, you're breaking WhatLife," Fidelia called out over the sound of the shower. "Good thing you kept that mask on."
When Alex emerged, towel-dried and comfortable in an oversized sweater, she scrolled through the articles herself, startled by the sheer volume of attention a single dinner had generated. Thousands of comments, dozens of think-pieces already speculating about Ethan's love life after years of near-total privacy. She'd known Ethan was popular. She hadn't fully understood what that word meant until she saw it laid out in numbers this large, and for a moment she wondered exactly what she'd agreed to walk into.
She settled in to watch her show, only half paying attention as Fidelia, still working, mentioned offhand, "I cancelled the meeting with Priceless. Now that we're locked into Royalstar, there's no reason to keep talking to them. Their CEO apparently wanted to see you personally — I said no. They didn't take it well, kept calling back twice."
"Fine by me," Alex said, eyes on the screen. "Their contract terms weren't even clear. I wasn't interested to begin with."
Her phone buzzed a moment later. A message from Ethan, wishing her goodnight, nothing more elaborate than that. She smiled before she could stop herself, and Fidelia, catching the expression out of the corner of her eye, said nothing, which was somehow worse than if she'd teased her outright.
Good night, fake boyfriend, Alex typed back, and set the phone face-down before she could think too hard about why she'd added the smiley face after it.
Across town, Ethan read the reply lying in bed, grinning wide enough that his dimples showed even with no one there to see them. He hadn't expected to feel anything about a two-word text from a woman he'd known for less than two days. He fell asleep still smiling, which hadn't happened in longer than he wanted to think about, and if his assistant noticed anything unusual in the mood of his morning texts the next day, she was smart enough not to mention it.
In her office, Leila tracked the online storm with the satisfaction of someone watching a plan come together exactly on schedule. The mixed reactions — outrage, curiosity, speculation — were precisely what she'd hoped for. Ethan himself seemed entirely unbothered by any of it, as always leaving the management of his public image to the people paid to handle it, a level of detachment that used to worry Leila until she'd learned it was simply how he survived fame at all.
Before heading home for the night, she called him with one instruction: keep Alex's face obscured in any future public appearances until casting for the film wrapped. Filming was still two months out. She wanted every one of those weeks to build Alex's visibility in Florelia as steadily as possible, with Ethan's fame doing most of the heavy lifting, and she had no intention of letting the mystery collapse before it had done its work.
Online, the speculation only intensified. Alex's face had been entirely hidden — glasses, mask, hat, even her legs covered by boots — leaving fans with nothing to work from but her height, the shape of a coat, and the glint of a ring on her hand. Theories multiplied by the hour, each one wilder than the last, none of them anywhere close to the truth.
Alex, scrolling through a handful of the wilder guesses before finally putting her phone away for the night, found the entire spectacle both unsettling and strangely funny. One thread had convinced itself the mystery woman was a European heiress; another insisted she was a stunt double from Ethan's last film. Nobody, so far, had guessed model. Nobody had guessed her name.
She lay awake a while longer than she meant to, staring at the ceiling of a hotel room that would, in a few days, no longer be hers to stay in — the apartment Royalstar had prepared would be ready soon, and she and Fidelia would finally have somewhere in this city to call their own again. It struck her, lying there, that she hadn't thought once tonight about the reason she'd come back to Florelia in the first place. For a few hours, over a bowl of hotpot and a hand she hadn't flinched away from, revenge had simply slipped her mind entirely.
She wasn't sure yet whether that worried her or not.