Later, when Ben’s finally asleep and I’m sitting in my tiny room scrolling through Marlowe’s Instagram I find the post.
My phone lights up. A text from an unknown number.
Then another.
Then five more.
Marlowe’s followers. Finding me. Sending messages. Some supportive. Most not.
Gold digger.
Home wrecker.
Opportunist.
When your fifteen minutes of fame come back to haunt you except this time you’re not even trying to be famous and the algorithm still finds a way to destroy you.
Amara calls a few minutes later.
“I sawit,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Are you going to let Marco’s lawyers handle it?” Amara says. “They can bury her.”
I think about that. About what it would look like. Billionaire restaurateur destroys struggling mommy blogger. The optics alone would be terrible.
And more than that? Still I see my old self in Marlowe.
“No,” I tell Amara. “Let her have her time. Just like I had mine.”
“At least let his team issue a take-down request,” Amara presses.
“I’m sure they’ve already sent one,” I reply. “The video will be down, soon.”
I hang up. Sit there in the dark.
My phone keeps buzzing with random messages.
I’m about to stop reading them when I spot a text from Marco:Say the word, and she’s done.
So that’s what it takes for Marco to finally contact me.
A mini-crisis situation.
Good to know he’s still in there, somewhere.
I consider letting him destroy her. And if I’m being brutally honest, I kind ofwantto destroy her.
But instead I type back:Let her do her thing.
He texts back:Fine. But if she ever posts footage of Ben, she’s done.
Fair.
More obscene texts come in from random numbers. Through it all, I keep refreshing the app until finally I get the 404 error.
The post has been removed.
