ME
They just know the hashtag.
HOLLY
Are you okay?
Am I okay?
I'm watching the man I've loved since I was seventeen get publicly eviscerated, and I can't do a single thing about it because defending him would require admitting I'm in love with him, which would require admitting I've been lying to everyone I love for over a decade.
And he’s probably sleeping with no clue he’s as to what he’s going to wake up to.
So no. No, I'm not okay.
ME
I don't know how to help him.
HOLLY
Oh honey
HOLLY
This isn't your fight to fix
But that's where she's wrong.
This has always been my fight.
I just never had the courage to show up for it.
I set my phone face-down on the nightstand and stare at the ceiling. The same ceiling Everett stared at when he told me about the initials. Jedediah and Eleanor, carved into the same log, separated by a construction mistake.
Two people who loved each other their whole lives, but memorialized like this. Looking across the same room but never quite reaching.
That's us.
That's always been us.
And now some stranger with a camera crew is trying to burn down the very room we've been reaching across.
I close my eyes and let the tears come.
The helpless kind.
Tomorrow, Everett will wake up to this.
Tomorrow, he'll have to face the cameras and the comments and the slow unraveling of his reputation.
Tomorrow, he'll have to smile through that stupid reindeer bachelor auction while strangers on the internet call him a fraud.
And I'll be there. Watching. Documenting.
Hiding behind my lens like I always do.
Because that's what I'm good at.
