A cold slice of terror cuts straight through me. Tears sting instantly, hot and traitorous, and I swipe them away so fast my skin burns.
With shaking fingers, I click the hashtag with my name.
My throat closes.
Video after video after video floods the screen—strangers, self-proclaimed crime reporters, gossip-chasing influencers, true-crime vultures—all of them dissecting my life, my story, my trauma like it’s entertainment. My name. My face. My past. All dragged out into the light I have spent twelve years avoiding.
And I know—God, Iknow—this didn’t just suddenly surface on some algorithmic fluke.
This has Tracey written all over it.
Her poison fingerprints are everywhere.
The harassment back then had been almost unbearable. If it hadn’t been for Anna—if she hadn’t stepped in, shielded me, given me a place to disappear—I honestly don’t know if I would have survived it. But even then, social media was different. It was softer in its reach. It wasn’t the unstoppable monster it is today.
This—what’s happening now—is something else entirely. A monster with teeth.
Every video, every thread, every stitched clip is worse than the last. Each influencer is trying to outdo the others—more dramatic, more sensational, more unhinged speculation—because the more shocking the story, the more clicks they get. And clicks mean money.
They call it “justice.”
They call it “raising awareness.”
They call it “telling the truth.”
But they don’t care about me. Not even a little.
I’m not a person to them. I’m a spectacle. A headline. A chance to go viral.
And as I scroll—my face plastered next to his, my trauma weaponized for their engagement—my chest constricts so tightly it feels like my lungs are going to stop working altogether.
I won’t ever escape this.
It’s happening all over again, but amplified—louder, faster, crueler. And worse…I’ve dragged the two people I love most into the blast radius.
Anna—my best friend, my anchor—fresh off winning an Academy Award, will now be tethered to this nightmare simply because she loves me. Because she employs me. Because I stand next to her.
My boyfriend—my sweet Miles—one of the stars of the Stanley Cup-winning hockey team, the kind of man the entirecity adores, won’t be able to outrun it either. They’ll twist it. They’ll spin it. They’ll make him guilty by association. They always find a way.
No one connected to me is safe from this.
It’s going to be everywhere. Every timeline. Every feed. Every comment section.
And when it hits full speed—when the story spreads and mutates and grows claws—I will lose everything.
Everything I’ve built.
Everything I’ve found.
Everything I finally let myself hope for.
Because no matter how hard I run, my past always finds a way to catch me.
Sobs wrack my body—deep, shuddering, uncontrollable—while I stare at my phone, unable to stop watching video after grotesque video. My thumb keeps scrolling even as my vision blurs, as if some part of me believes the next clip will magically make this all make sense.
It doesn’t.
It only gets worse.
