Chapter 2 Fine Print

MIA

The contract sits on my desk like it's waiting to bite me.

Thirty-one pages, and I already signed the last one at midnight without reading past page four. My hands shake as I flip back to the beginning, coffee going cold beside me, my mother's fifteen-thousand-dollar chemo bill still glowing on my laptop screen behind it.

I force myself to actually read this time.

"You're up early," Danny says, shuffling into the kitchen in his socks, hair sticking up on one side. He's fifteen, and even half-asleep he notices everything.

"Couldn't sleep," I mutter, not looking up from the page.

"Is that the contract?" His eyes flick to the papers, curious and a little worried.

"Go eat something," I say, sharper than I mean to.

He grabs a granola bar and doesn't move, watching me with the particular patience of a kid who's learned exactly when not to push his sister. I flip to page six, and my stomach drops straight through the floor.

Physical affection as required for image purposes, including but not limited to hand-holding, embracing, and kissing.

My face goes hot, then cold. I read the line four times, like it might rearrange itself into something less insane if I just look hard enough.

"It's fine," I say, when Danny asks again with just his eyebrows. "It's just a lot of pages."

I'm lying, and he knows it, but he lets me have it anyway.

My phone buzzes on the counter. Caleb.

Caleb: did you read the whole thing

I stare at the screen, my pulse loud in my ears.

Me: I'm on page six.

Caleb: page six is nothing. keep going.

Nothing. He calls kissing a virtual stranger for cameras nothing.

Me: page six says kissing.

Caleb: yeah

Me: yeah??

Caleb: we can talk about it. meet before the press conference. 2pm, the rink.

I want to scream into a pillow. Instead I set the phone face-down and finish my coffee cold, hands still trembling around the mug.

...

The rink is empty when I get there, my footsteps echoing off the ice, the compressors humming low like they're keeping some kind of secret too. Caleb's already on the bleachers, skates untied, staring at nothing.

"You're early," I say, my voice sharper than I intend.

"I'm always early. You're the one who's usually late."

I sit two seats away, arms crossed, refusing to let him see how badly my hands are still shaking. "Kissing, Caleb. You couldn't have led with that?"

"It's not every appearance. Just the ones where it matters." He won't quite look at me. "The optics need to be right."

"The optics." My voice cracks on the word, humiliation and fury tangled together. "Not us. The optics."

Something flashes across his face, there and gone.

"I'm not pretending this is romantic," he says. "I need you to know what you signed before it happens on camera and you look surprised."

"I don't do surprised."

"I know. That's why I told you now." Something almost like respect flickers across his face, gone as fast as it came.

"There's a clause on page nineteen," I snap, refusing to let him steer this. "About my family. I can't discuss my personal circumstances without your father's approval? My mother is not a circumstance. She's my mother, and she's dying, and I will not let some contract decide when I'm allowed to talk about that."

His jaw goes tight. For one terrifying second, I think he's going to defend it.

"That clause isn't about controlling what you say about her specifically," he says slowly, like he's choosing each word off a minefield. "It's about my dad wanting control of the narrative. All of it. Not just mine."

"That's not comforting, Caleb."

"I know."

"Can you get it removed?"

"I can try."

"Try isn't a yes."

"It's the only thing I've got right now, so it's going to have to be enough." He drags a hand through his hair, and for the first time since I walked in, he looks genuinely exhausted, not performing anything. "There's more you need to know. Something worse than the family clause."

His face drains of color completely.

"Mia, there's something on page twenty-three you need to see before four o'clock. Something about my dad. Something about your mom's hospital."

My stomach turns to ice.

"What kind of something?"

He doesn't answer right away, and the silence stretches so long I can hear my own heartbeat slamming against my ribs.

"Just read it," he finally says, standing so fast his skates nearly slide out from under him. "Before four. You're going to want to be sitting down when you do."

He walks toward the ice without looking back, leaving me alone in the bleachers with a folder full of pages I suddenly don't want to touch, my hands frozen around page nineteen, and the horrible, sinking certainty that whatever's on page twenty-three is about to change absolutely everything.

I don't move for a long moment. The compressors hum on, indifferent, and somewhere out on the ice I hear his skates finally hit the rink, slow and heavy, like a boy walking toward something he'd rather not face either.

My fingers find page twenty-three before my brain fully agrees to let them.

I don't get past the first line.