“Maybe you should let Bailey decide what she wants to do,” Dallas said.

“You don’t think I want to? Giving her the choice might be the same thing as making it for her. If I tell her, and Morrison finds out, he’ll go nuclear. Game over.”

The fallout played in my head like a horror movie on repeat: that fucking email going to her friends, her family, everyone affiliated with her scholarship and internship. Bailey’s life falling apart like a house of cards, all because of me.

Morrison could pull the trigger at some point anyway, with or without dragging Bailey into it. God willing, it would be without. At the end of the day, I could own up to the things I’d done, even if I hadn’t intended them to be public knowledge.

Whether Bailey would want to be with me once she knew about the tape, though? The answer to that question scared me.

“If you don’t tell her,” Dallas said, his voice quiet, “you could lose her.”

It winded me like a hockey stick to the stomach. Again, he was right, but I couldn’t accept that as a possibility. I couldn’t be the reason her dreams went up in smoke, either. Hence the hellish purgatory I was trapped in.

I itched to pick up the phone. Better yet, to go over there and see her. I missed her more than anything in the world. The distance I’d put between us was literal torture. Like I was missing a limb, and it had only been days. How much more of this could I take?

“I’m trying to keep her out of the blast zone. I don’t care what happens to me, but I can’t let her get dragged into this shit. What would you do if it was Shiv?”

“I’d protect her,” Dallas admitted. “At all costs.”

“Exactly. Priority number one was pushing her out of the path of an oncoming freight train. If you have any ideas beyond that, I’m all ears.”

Beside me on my bed, my phone lit up.

* * *

“You going to come to my first NHL game?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

* * *

The hours I had to wait to meet with Vincent felt like a fucking eternity. Dallas tried to stay with me, but his anxiety level was feeding into mine, so I finally forced him to leave the house and keep his original plans with Shiv.