Chapter 4 She is putting up a good show

Nobody moved.

That was the thing I remembered most about that moment afterward the way everyone in that room just stopped. Like someone had pressed pause on all of us at once. My father. Kiara. Even Principal Adeyemi, who had no idea what he was sitting in the middle of.

Kiara's hand was still reaching behind her for the door handle she hadn't quite reached.

Kylian's mother hadn't moved at all. She stood exactly where she'd been standing when we walked in, hands clasped in front of her, and she was looking at Kiara the way you look at something you've been patient about for a very long time.

I looked at my father.

He was staring at Kylian's mother with an expression I had never seen on his face before. Not anger. Not confusion. Something closer to dread.

Kiara recovered first. That was the thing about her she always recovered. She straightened her back and smoothed her jacket and by the time she turned back to face the room she had assembled something that looked almost like composure.

"Mrs. Ashford," she said. Her voice was perfectly pleasant. "What a surprise."

"Is it?" Kylian's mother said.

The room stayed very quiet.

Principal Adeyemi cleared his throat. "Perhaps we should all take a seat."

Nobody sat.

I looked at Kylian. He was standing near the window where he always stood and his face was completely unreadable. But his eyes were on his mother, not on Kiara, and something in the set of his jaw told me this was not a surprise to him.

He had known she would be here.

He had known and he hadn't said anything.

I filed that away somewhere to think about later and turned back to the room.

"We're here for the girls," my father said. His voice came out slightly too loud. "That's all. We just need to understand the terms of this arrangement before anything is signed."

"Of course," Mrs. Ashford said. She turned to Principal Adeyemi and smiled. "Please. Continue."

And just like that it was over. Whatever had charged the air went somewhere underneath the surface and the meeting continued and nobody explained anything. Adeyemi talked about the campaign timeline. Monica handed out folders. Kiara sat with her hands folded in her lap and her face a careful blank and did not look at Mrs. Ashford again.

I sat there and understood nothing and felt everything.

---

The next morning the story had already spread.

I didn't know how. I never knew how these things moved so fast through the school like oxygen, like something that had always been in the air and just needed the right conditions to become visible. By the time I got to my locker, there were already looks. By the second period, there were whispers.

The version going around was that I had used the campaign to get close to Dalton. That I had somehow engineered being on the same list as him. Trixie Baker, who had shown up to his game with a handmade sign like someone who had never been told no, had found another angle.

I heard Edna say it to someone near the water fountain. She didn't lower her voice.

I kept walking.

Trisha, across the corridor, watched me pass with her arms folded and her expression perfectly neutral. She hadn't started the rumor. She didn't need to. She had people for that.

---

The K&L meeting was at four.

I arrived at the address Monica had sent through and took the elevator to the sixth floor and walked into a room that was all glass and clean lines and the kind of quiet that costs money to maintain. Dalton was already there, sitting with one ankle over his knee, looking at his phone.

He didn't look up when I walked in.

Monica was setting things up at the far end of the table. Kylian came in two minutes after me, jacket on, unhurried, and the meeting began.

It was professional and precise. Monica walked us through the campaign concept, a youth line, natural imagery, and two faces that were supposed to represent something real. She talked about shoot dates and brand guidelines and contractual obligations. I took notes. Dalton looked at his phone under the table.

Halfway through, Monica asked us both about our personal aesthetic. What we wore. What we listened to. What we cared about.

Dalton answered in four words. Monica wrote them down without reacting.

I answered properly. I talked about drama and color and the way I thought about presentation. I was aware of Kylian watching me from the other end of the table while I spoke.

"That's genuinely useful," Monica said.

Dalton looked up from his phone for the first time. He looked at me, then at Monica, then back at me.

"You're going to have a problem," he said.

Monica looked at him. "Sorry?"

"With her." He said it flatly, like he was pointing out a structural issue in a building. "She performs. Everything she just said was for the room. That's a drama student thing. The camera picks it up."

The table went quiet.

I looked at him directly. He met my eyes without flinching.

"Dalton," Kylian said. His voice was even.

"I'm just saying what the camera will say." Dalton shrugged and looked back at his phone. "Better to know now."

I did not react. I sat with my hands flat on the table and my face neutral and I did not give him a single thing to work with. I had learned that in the same house where I learned everything else how to take a hit and not show it.

Monica moved on.

---

Kylian found me afterward in the corridor outside the elevator.

I was pressing the button and watching the numbers count down and telling myself to hold it together until I got outside.

"Trixie."

I turned.

He walked toward me without hurrying. He stopped a few feet away and looked at me for a moment before he spoke.

"Why do you let people talk to you that way?"

I blinked. "What?"

"In there." He nodded back toward the meeting room. "And before that. At school. Your stepsister. Dalton." He paused. "Why do you just take it?"

The elevator arrived. The doors opened. I stood there and didn't get in.

"I don't just take it," I said.

"You don't react," he said. "That's not the same thing."

I looked at him. He was watching me with those steady eyes and there was no pity in them, which was the only reason I didn't walk away. I hated pity. Pity meant someone had decided you were already finished.

This wasn't a pity. It was something else. Something that felt more like a challenge.

"I react," I said. "Just not where people can see it."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "That must be exhausting."

The elevator doors closed without me.

---

I got home just after six.

The house was the kind of quiet that meant something had already happened inside it. I felt it before I saw anything stillness in the air that didn't belong.

My father was in the sitting room. He was alone. He had a glass in his hand and he was sitting in the armchair by the window and he looked up when I walked in like he'd been waiting.

"Sit down," he said.

I sat.

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a folded document. He set it on the coffee table between us and smoothed it flat with one hand.

I leaned forward and read the heading.

My stomach dropped.

It was a letter of withdrawal. Addressed to K&L Beauty and Supplies. Signed in my father's handwriting at the bott

om, with today's date.

Removing Trixie Baker from consideration for the campaign.

I looked up at him.

"Kiara thinks it's for the best," he said.