Sweet Romance13 min read
The Blue Tear and the Contract I Signed
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I signed the contract, because sometimes the safest lie is the one everyone believes.
“It was a beautiful afternoon,” the reporter said into my face, “Eden Rousseau, your performance in Whispering Lotus has won the Lotus Award. How do you feel?”
“I’m grateful to everyone who worked on the film,” I said, smiling at the lens. “Most of all, to my fans. Without them I wouldn’t be here.”
They smiled, they clapped, they asked for a posed close-up, and then they left me with the music and the teapot on the small patio. I should have risen, smiling, and gone through the neat ritual of public charm. Instead I kicked off my heels and stretched my legs across the table like a woman who had nothing to prove.
A voice beside me said, “If your fans saw you like this, would they be disappointed?”
I froze, then turned. He walked in like he owned the light. Carter Nasir filled the space like a photograph come to life: a man polished to the point of reflection, smiling in a way that said mercy and menace at once.
“There’s no one here,” I said, lazily, pretending not to notice the way his gaze traveled over my bare ankles. “A show for the audience, and another one when the curtain falls. I can’t live like that if I never let the curtain fall.”
He sat, ordered coffee, and drew a paper from his bag. “I signed it,” he said, setting the paper between us.
I took it and glanced. My name and his name, black on white. Contract. Marriage. The words shocked and then, strangely, comforted.
“Just clarify it,” I said. “Go tell the press we’re just friends. That’ll fix things.”
Carter smiled like someone solving a puzzle. “Try telling them that after you are seen leaving a hotel together,” he said. “Words don’t hold in this industry. Evidence does.”
“You mean we slept together?” My voice was flat. But when he said, “We did,” my breath stuttered.
“You sign,” he said. “We pretend. We stop the rumors. It’s temporary.”
I looked at the paper. A marriage contract whose ink would seal the rumor. The camera lights outside reduced everything to a rumor that needed fixing. “Fine,” I said. “I sign.”
That was how I found myself, days later, sitting on a public stage while a company made my life a headline.
“When did you get married?” a broadcaster demanded in a live stream.
“Three months ago,” I read, and the world rearranged itself around the sentence.
Later, I would wonder if signing a paper could change fate. For now, I kept breathing and letting my name land on gossip sites.
“So what do you plan to do now?” Beau Benjamin, my manager and long-time friend, asked when the cameras turned away. He had been the one to fetch my shoes when I’d kicked them off in a press lull.
“Keep working,” I said. “Don’t make it bigger than it is.”
Beau took a sip of juice. “There’s one more problem.”
He pointed to my car window with his eyes: a small boy on the doorstep, hair like a tumble of cloud, eyes like someone who notices everything. He rushed forward and shouted, “Mom!”
I stared. I had never seen that boy. Beau laughed, embarrassed. “He’s someone’s child who somehow thinks you’re his mother. It’s a mystery on its own.”
He wasn’t just anyone’s child. At the studio, whispers circled like moths—he was Carter’s son. Keegan Hansen—no, that was silly; names were names. He was called Keegan by the staff, a bright little human who wrapped a fist around my finger like a knot.
“Take him home,” Beau said. “It will help the story. It will make us look—solid.”
I looked down at the little hand clamped into mine and felt my courage dissolve.
“You don’t have to pretend,” I said aloud as we drove. I was talking to myself. “But you need to know how.”
“I know,” the boy said suddenly, as if answering me. “I want to go with Mom.”
I almost laughed. Mom. A word heavy with weight.
At the studio later, a livestream announced that Carter and I had been married for three months. No footage of us on stage. No handshake. The company put the contract in the feed like a propgun—official, neat, and irreproachable.
“You’ll be fine,” Beau said. “Keep going. Let them see the child, let the child create the picture they want.”
“So they can gossip less?” I asked.
“Or at least in a direction we can control,” Beau said. “Children are the best proof people can read. If they see closeness, they stop guessing.”
Keegan clung to me in the car like a tiny captain. Later, in the makeup room, a set assistant called out, “Someone’s child in section C! Who’s looking for this boy?”
The little boy walked free through people who tried to shepherd him away. He pointed and shouted, “Mom!”
Everyone turned. The electric silence that followed was the kind you get when a spell is cast in public.
I went to him and, with a smile I had learned to make, took him in my arms. Phones rose like sunflowers.
“Is this—” someone began.
“He’s Carter’s son,” another whispered.
“And she’s—” The whispers stitched themselves into news.
“It’s a plot,” Beau whispered in my ear. “We control the plot.”
They’d wanted staging. They’d wanted a story. Instead they got a child who chose me, and the internet did what it does: it fed.
“Eden,” a voice said softly, and I looked up to see Carter across the room, Keegan in his arms like a third limb. “Do you want him?”
He handed the boy over as if a question were a small object.
“Take him,” Carter said. “For now. Until we can say what we need to.”
That night, alone in my small living room, Keegan fell asleep against my chest. My phone buzzed with messages. Someone had found a photograph of me talking to Caspian Stephens outside the studio earlier that day. Caspian was the kind of composer who made the air feel holy—the man who once told me he loved me and who I had turned down.
It was a simple picture, a still of two people and a window. The caption said, “Their secrets travel in daylight.”
When I called Carter, he answered as if the photo were a splinter in his palm. “I’ll handle it,” he said. “And Eden—don’t go out alone.”
He always spoke like a man holding a map. His words were directions more than comforts.
We moved into his estate not because the contract demanded it—though it did say we would live under the same roof—but because the world wanted the cardboard picture of a family. Carter handed me keys like a man making a chess move.
“Take what you need,” he said. “Everything else I’ll bring around.”
The house was more a fortress than a home. On the stairs six staff stood like silent statues and sang in unison, “Welcome home.” The echo smelled of wood and winter.
Keegan ran up the stairs as if he owned the compass of the place. Carter’s fatherly gestures were careful, exact.
“Stay in the guest wing,” he said, then stopped. “But call me Carter, when it’s just us.”
I tested it once in the kitchen, and the sound of his name fell in my mouth like a coin. It felt too casual and too intimate all at once.
That night, alone in a bed too big and smooth, he found me on the edge of resisting and surrendering. He took me as if to punish and to teach at once, and later, after everything quieted and the house settled into the sigh of huge rooms, he stepped away and said, “I will not let any man touch you in ways you will regret again.”
“You assume a lot,” I whispered.
He smiled. “I assume I will be the one to protect what is mine.”
There are moments he made me forget the contract on the table—the way he surprised me with small private mercies, the way he took my jacket when I shivered, the way he watched a child sleep. I began to notice the tiny things. When I said something worrying, he would come back from the edge of his schedule to fix it. When I didn’t say anything, he would still notice. Those were three of the small things that felt like beginnings: he laughed at me one evening when I had been serious for too long; he slipped off his coat for me when I said I was cold; and once—once—he stood close enough to brush my hand while we were both pretending not to be watching each other.
“You know,” Beau said as we drove to a dinner where a charity auction would be held, “there are rumors the director Dev Crawford and Carter are doing a big reconciliation over that art-house picture they want to push.”
“Dev?” I asked. “He hates Carter.”
“Profits rewrite history,” Beau said.
At the gala, the lights were low and the bids were high. A blue stone—“Blue Tear,” the host called it—sat under a glass like a confession. Carter placed a bid and raised it like an oath.
“Five million,” he said.
It hovered above the room like a bell. Someone laughed—Lloyd Avila would have said it was flamboyant, were he there. A handful of people applauded. The necklace, which had been a prop of legend, was suddenly on my throat, and his hands lingered there like a reminder.
“You mustn’t pawn it,” I said, breathless.
“What would make you think I would?” He kissed me in the camera flash so that the internet would splinter into gossip again. Keegan watched and laughed and said, “Mom and Dad.”
The necklace had a story: the Blue Tear was said to represent fidelity—ha!—and Carter gave it as if he was making a vow. I wrapped the tiny cool stone with my breath.
Life at the estate settled into an ordinary strange: there were tender mornings and cruel headlines. A man in a blue suit—Finley Rodriguez—stood too close at a party and said of me with a grin, “She’s in for a storm.”
“There are always storms,” Carter said, and he offered his elbow like an armor.
But nothing prepared me for the first time I faced public shame. Someone leaked the photograph of me and Caspian in that quiet corridor. The caption was a sugar-coated weapon. I came home to Carter’s study to find him waiting and a trail of comments scrolling on-screen like an accusation.
“You have one minute,” he said.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“You had forgotten,” he said. “You said you had blown off something you could not remember.”
“You mean that night?” I was shocked he’d found out. “It was a mistake. I was—”
“You were alone with him,” he interrupted, and the words were dry. “Why were you alone with him?”
“Because he—” My voice fell soft. “He asked me to sing. He needed my help.”
“You refused him before,” he said.
“I did,” I admitted, because the truth was thinner than shame.
“You will explain to me who he is,” he ordered, “and you will not be secretive. You will not give people any reason to doubt.”
That sting—was it jealousy or care? I couldn’t tell. The line blurs when two people have made an industry of lies.
I buried myself in work. Dev Crawford’s film became our campaign. Caspian Stephens asked me to sing the theme. When I first read the lyrics—windless, patient, waiting like a season—it felt like someone had written down my own small soft heart and published it.
“Sing,” Caspian said softly in the recording booth later. He looked at me with the distant weight of someone who carries melody like a private thing.
We sang. His voice rode the words like a boat. Later, on the set, a small singer, Jaycee Smith, fought for a song and then shared it with Gabrielle English. The day turned into an odd, music-filled family. Caspian told me once, “You should sing. You should let your voice be the boat that crosses all the winters.”
Then inevitability arrived in a way both foolish and cunning. Gabrielle English—poised, pale, with a smile like a blade—put a photograph online and called it evidence. The world sharpened. Gabrielle had her reasons: a rival’s envy, a label’s games, ambition fed by cruelty. When the scandal exploded, comments called me “two-faced,” “unfaithful,” “cheap spectacle.” Caspian stopped speaking through the papers altogether.
Carter looked at the page and then at me, and he said, “She did this.”
“Who did?” I asked. My voice was small.
“Gabrielle English,” he replied. “She has been orbiting our story. She likes to burn other people’s houses to get warmth.”
I wanted to be angry. I wanted to fight her myself. But Carter did it differently. He prepared a proper exposure—public, controlled, and ruthless.
“You want to expose her?” I asked.
“I will make sure she falls where everyone can see,” he said. “You will sit with me through it.”
We arranged a charity symposium—an art piece, a presentation, a stiff room full of people who would sit in judgement and who would hold influence. Gabrielle was invited like any other guest. The lights were bright, the microphones ready. I sat with Keegan between us and Carter beside me, folding his fingers as if on prayer beads.
The hall filled with people: sponsors, reporters, fans—curious bees. Harper’s stylists and the old distribution magnates. Gabrielle arrived in a gown nicked at the shoulder like ivy. She smiled as if the room were a mirror set for her triumph.
Carter stood and told a story. “Tonight,” he said, “we are raising money for schools and truth. But if truth is currency, we should know who is spending it and who is stealing it.”
Gabrielle’s smile wavered the first time a camera turned to her face. Carter spoke with cool speed, showing messages, timelines, and phone evidence. He made it painstakingly clear: Gabrielle had been sharing staged photographs with a private account, prompting tabloids, and profiting from the chase. He had a former publicist on the call who confessed to taking money to place rumor seeds.
“Why?” the moderator asked.
“Because fabrication sells,” Carter said. “Because she hoped to outshine by dimming another’s light.”
He handed the microphone to me. “This is Eden,” he said. “She will say nothing of her heart tonight. I will show where the story began.”
I stood, because men who hold maps are often kinder when they hand you the map. I looked at the projection, at the messages, and at the steady, thinning smile on Gabrielle’s face. I told the truth I could: I had met Caspian for music, not for confession. I had been there to record a song and to decide for the film. I had been the object of a photograph, but not the author of a scandal. I had been given a coin and a contract and hadn’t understood the weight of the two joined.
“Why?” someone asked from the audience.
“Because she wanted fame more than music,” I said, and the words were not cruel; they were a matter of fact. “She chose hunger over care.”
Then Carter laid out the rest. He revealed that Gabrielle had been in contact with a certain columnist who had promised increased exposure in exchange for material. He showed bank transfers, short messages, and the small pieces of proof that made up a net. The room made small sounds—sighs, clicks of tongues, the rustle of papers like leaves.
Gabrielle’s face changed. At first, she blinked in denial. “This is a lie,” she said, her voice rising. “You can’t prove—”
“I can,” Carter said. “And I will make sure you answer for it.”
She laughed at first—sharp, brittle, because the laugh was a shield. Then, as one piece after another was unrolled—an early email begging for leverage, a receipt for a photographer’s payment, a recorded call—her laughter cracked.
“I never—” she said. She looked at those around her as if searching for an ally. Faces were polite, then cool, then distant. Someone in the front row pretended to check their phone; a table of sponsors lowered their eyes. The moderator tried to steer the night back to charity, but the damage was done.
“Gabrielle,” said Carter quietly, “how much did they pay you to plant that story?”
She faltered, then gave a number that sounded small and greedy in that moment. The word slid and broke. A woman in an expensive coat whispered, “How could she?”
Her tour manager tried to interrupt, but the recordings dropped like stones. The crowd shifted, and cameras found Gabrielle’s face like vultures on a carcass.
At one point, Gabrielle’s expression moved through stages—pride, suspicion, denial, fury, pleading, and finally collapse.
“No,” she said. “You can’t do this.”
The moderator read her contract: a clause about ethical conduct. A sponsor, suddenly embarrassed, told the announcer they regretted any association. A label rep sent an emergency text and then, on-camera, asked politely if Gabrielle would step outside.
“Are you serious?” she hissed, now aware of the cameras, now the trade-offs had begun. “You’ll ruin me.”
“You already began it,” someone said.
“I’ll sue!” she screamed, and the word landed like a thin shield against a tide.
A cluster of fans at the back stood up and shouted, “How could you!” and the sound was the kind of public accusation that fractures reputations. Some clapped—some booed. A few dared to record. A teen took a photo and posted it in seconds. Reporters smelled the blood of scandal and pounced like a pack.
In the exit hallway the press gathered like wolves. Carter’s team disclosed the evidence straight to the paper. The label pulled Gabrielle from the campaign. Her endorsement deals—those shiny ropes she’d used to climb—began to unwind. Sponsors withdrew with polite statements; once a tide pulls from a shore, everything left becomes vulnerable.
The punishment—Carter’s public exposure—was not physical. It was a dismantling: her contracts, her allies, her fan base thinning as a net is cut. She staggered from the podium into a private room where PR people shouted apologies into their hands. A few thick-eyed producers muttered about reputations. Her voice, which once filled rooms, now came out small.
I watched her step down like someone who had forgotten how to walk. She stopped pretending that she hadn’t engineered the rumor. The room that had been ready to admire her was now too cold to be kind. A sponsor whispered, “We will disassociate.” A brand director said, “We cannot be attached to deception.”
Outside, cameras caught her leaving. They filmed her hands, the way she had lost the fight in her mouth. People who had once cheered the drama turned their backs. The humiliation was public and the consequences were precise: lost deals, scathing columns, a cut-off of the gossip supply that had fed her.
It went on for hours, then days. She called what remained of her friends. Many did not answer. A PR woman offered to help, then asked fees three times the original. Her social media numbers dipped. Her agency considered their liability and then released a statement that tried to be sympathetic. Podcasts replayed the evidence. It was humiliating and cold.
At the center of it, she sat alone in a room with a small dry mouth and asked why she had been the author of her own undoing.
Witnesses said she went from fury to pleading to collapse. I saw the last phase—where anger melts into quiet, and the young strategist becomes a small woman with coffee and a desperate need for shelter. Some people filmed her leaving; others walked past without a glance.
When the dust settled, Gabrielle had lost the shining rope that had lifted her. Agents texted to say they couldn’t take calls. A brand withdrew their line; a director refused to speak. The very industry that celebrated spectacle had voted with its purse.
It was satisfying, yes, to see the liar exposed. It was also the kind of vengeance that carried a smell of iron and ugh. I thought about how carefully Carter had designed the scene: public, undeniable, and proportional. He had not punched her or ruined her home; he had taken away what the public had let her earn through falsehood.
Afterward, Keegan asked me, “Did she cry?”
“She did,” I said. “But she needs to learn that lies have a way of taking themselves apart.”
He shrugged and ran off to the library.
That day I understood how the world worked. People who build their houses out of gossip and fire will always be at risk of a storm. And yet, the most important thing was always softer: I wanted to keep singing. I wanted to be known for my work, not headlines.
A week later, Carter left on a flight. “I have to negotiate,” he said. “If all goes well, I’ll secure a deal that helps the studio and you. I’ll be gone for a week.”
“When you leave, don’t let me be reckless,” I said.
He leaned close and kissed my mouth like an apology and a promise. “You will not be reckless,” he whispered. “You will be brilliant.”
I sang for Dev’s film, and Caspian and I reconciled in music. He sent me small notes about harmonies. We walked the line where friendship and history cross, and it never bled into anything dangerous.
Everything, finally, shifted toward a strange ordinary: being asked to change, to be the face of a brand, to play all the scenes. I learned to call Carter by his name when the house was ours alone. Keegan taught me to braid a small friendship into being. I learned how to hold an industry’s attention by being steady.
Months later, at another gala, a young reporter leaned in and asked, “Eden, did you ever think you’d sign a contract like that?”
I looked down at the Blue Tear on my throat and then at the child who called me Mom. Carter had given me a world I hadn’t asked for and then asked me to make it ours.
“No,” I said. “But I did sign it. And I learned to live with what I signed.”
That night, as I tucked Keegan into bed, I heard him murmur, “Mom, will you stop singing to me?”
“Never,” I said. “I’ll sing until your room becomes the whole world.”
He smiled in the dark and said, “Good. Because Mom’s song keeps the bad things away.”
I closed the door and stood for a moment in the hallway, the Blue Tear catching the light. It was only a stone, but we had made it a talisman. The world still made rumors; people still tried to burn others for warmth. But there were more steady hands now. And I was learning to be one of them.
The End
— Thank you for reading —