A beat passes. Then she leans her head against mine. “I hate that you’re hurting.”
“I hate that I still want him. That I keep hoping he’ll knock on the door and say it was all a mistake.”
Emily’s quiet for a moment. Then: “He would be the dumbest man alive to walk away from you. And I’ve met some contenders.”
I laugh again—this time a little more real.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I admit. “I just… I’m scared. And everything feels so heavy. And I hate crying in front of you while you’re eating chow mein.”
She grins. “Babe, I live for dramatic dumpling therapy.”
I lean into her. She wraps an arm around me and doesn’t let go.
Just then my phone starts buzzing on the coffee table.
I glance at it, but I’m too full and too emotionally wrung out to care. “Ignore it.”
Emily picks it up anyway. “Vivienne,” she announces, raising an eyebrow. “Should I answer?”
I shrug from the couch, face smushed into a pillow. “Sure. Can’t get worse.”
Emily swipes to accept. “This is Nora’s emotionally exhausted best friend speaking.”
There’s a pause. Emily’s face shifts from amused to alert in an instant. She sits straighter.
“Wait—slow down,” she says into the phone. “Vivienne, you’re on speaker.”
I sit up quickly, heart thudding. “What’s going on?”
Vivienne’s voice crackles through the line, edged with urgency. “Hey, Nora? You sitting down?”
“What’s going on?” I ask, already uneasy.
“It’s Jake. Jake Armstrong,” she says, her tone turning ice-cold. “He manipulated Max.”
I blink, stunned. “What are you talking about?”
“They had a meeting,” she continues. “Jake showed Max a screen recording from some old fan forum—posts supposedly written by you. Using your name and your library email. They made it look like you planned to meet Max, get pregnant… like it was all some scheme.”
My stomach drops out beneath me.
“What?”
“I’ve been digging,” she says. “And it’s total crap. The timestamps don’t make sense. The recovery email could’ve been spoofed—there’s no real verification. I even checked with a tech friend, and he thinks the whole forum could’ve been faked or scrubbed to plant the ‘evidence.’”
Emily swears under her breath. I can’t even speak.
“Jake used it to turn Max against you,” Vivienne says. “The second I heard about the forum, it felt off. So I started digging.”
Emily’s jaw tightens. “That absolute son of a—”
“But why?” I whisper.
Vivienne exhales. “Maybe it was revenge. His exclusive got tanked when you and Max got photographed in public.”
I close my eyes. My hands are shaking. Max thought I betrayed him—because someone made it look real.
It explains everything.
