illicit_ivy
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- Parts 19
New York, 1990. A city held together by lights, surface, and silence. In rooms scented with champagne and expectation, a woman like Taylor Swift was less a person than a performance - polished, rehearsed, and kept intact by the hands of those who claimed to know what was best for her. Her team managed her, her parents shaped her, the public adored her, and beneath all of it she remained - watching, calculating, enduring.
At twenty-five, she had already learned the art of withholding. There was power in being looked at, but more in knowing when not to speak. She understood exactly how to give people what they wanted. What she hadn't yet learned was what she wanted herself.
Eva Marlow was not meant to change that. A young actress with a name just beginning to circulate and a face not yet smoothed by fame, Eva entered the picture like a slip - something accidental, perhaps forgettable. But there are encounters that make memory behave differently. They don't announce themselves as pivotal. They unfold slowly, then all at once.
This is the story of what happens when the performance slips, and something real presses up from underneath. Not in the eyes of the public, but in the spaces no one was meant to see.
- My house of stone. Your ivy grows. And now I'm covered in you. -
- So yeah, it's a fire. It's a goddamn blaze in the dark and you started it. You started it. -