I had come on this trip thinking I was anonymous. That I had a blank slate. That I could breathe without my mistakes catalogued with memes and hashtags.
I’d thought I could breathe without feeling like everyone was watching me.
But I’d been wrong.
This had never been a clean start. It was a setup. How much of it? The entire trip? The excuse of Mom not being able to get a refund? Had Ashley and Mom cooked this up together? A misguided scheme cloaked in the guise of good intentions?
Would Ashley really do that to me?
And Noah?
I’d shown Noah the clip. I’d told him everything. If he’d known that they were talking about me, he would’ve said something.
Wouldn’t he?
He would have.
Of course, he would have.
In my escape from Babs, and Marla, and Josie, my feet carried me to the reception desk, where Tay was hunched over a stack of spreadsheets
“Tay.” I couldn’t tell if my voice sounded normal or not. I didn’t care. “Do you know where Noah went?”
She looked up, frowning slightly. “He must be upstairs. I gave his mom their room keys first.”
“So…he’s in our room?” We’d agreed we would share again.
Her eyebrows rose. “Huh. He must be.” She flipped what looked like a full deck of card keys, and then handed me one of them. Room 1616. “If your luggage isn’t there yet, it’ll be delivered shortly.”
Okay. This was good. If I was going to fall apart, at least it wouldn’t be in public.
I was pretty sure I thanked her. I hoped I did.
But it took all my shattered composure to shuffle across to the elevators. I was utterly untethered but also weighed down by a thousand pounds. And because I must have been the unluckiest person in Vegas, of course, I wasn’t alone.
Ed. Eddie. Patty. Denise. All looking at me.
Perfect.
We stood in awkward silence for a few seconds as the elevator began its journey upward. Going off the glowing numbers on the panel, they’d all be getting off before me, but until then...
“Not right what you did,” Ed muttered eventually. “A man has pride, you know. One mistake shouldn’t cost him his reputation. And then to pick up with Dr. Noah.”
What I did? “To whom?”
“Your fiancé. The world-renowned chef.”
“Ex-fiancé. And Leo is not world-renowned,” I informed him.
In that moment, Ed lost every benefit of the doubt I’d ever extended to him. The whole clueless-boomer act. The complaints that came with winks, his poor taste in jokes.
He was defending Leo.
“He was cheating, Ed,” Eddie snapped. “And we know the things he said in that post about Luna and Dr. Noah aren’t true. They didn’t even know each other when we left Denver.”
I closed my eyes.
Maybe if I stayed very still, I could hit reset on the last ten minutes. Or ten days. Or ten years.
