She looked at the avatar of the tweeter. It was the smiling blond woman from the table next to theirs, the one she’d thought was in the middle of writing something juicy.
You. You were the something juicy.
“You talked to him about your parents?”
Katrina shook her head at Rhiannon’s skeptical question. The surprise was valid. She didn’t talk about her parents with anyone, save Rhiannon and her therapist. Jas knew about some pieces of her family history. That was it. “We were talking about his mom’sdog, and Zeus,” she muttered. She waded through the meticulously detailed play-by-play of her and Ross’s interaction, each innocent action and part of their conversation taking on a rom-com spin.
“Jesus, there’s like over fifty tweets—” she gasped.
Breaking: #CafeBae and #CuteCafeGirl went to the bathroom AT THE SAME TIME
“What the hell, we didn’t go to the bathroom together. We definitely didn’t do what this is implying. He went to the bathroom. I went to get some napkins. I was barely gone for a few minutes.”
“This is so creepy.” Rhi took the phone from her and kept scrolling. “Jeez.He’s got a peach to die for.”
Katrina raked her hands through her hair. “Not entirely inaccurate, but irrelevant, since I wasn’t personally moved by the peach.”
Rhiannon shook her head. “They overheard him asking you out, and said you agreed.”
“I didn’t.” Katrina’s words were too loud, but she couldn’tdial back the volume, she was so agitated. “I mean, he did ask me out, but like I told you, I turned him down.”
Rhiannonkeptscrolling. Oh God, was it never-ending? “After a bajillion tweets of buildup, she probably had to make up a happy ending to satisfy her followers.”
Katrina scrubbed her face. “This lady doesn’t have a lot of followers, at least, does she?”
Rhiannon was silent for a moment, then she cleared her throat. “As of this morning, she has about two hundred thousand.”
Two hundredthousand.
“Some of those have to be bots, though,” Jia tagged on in a hurry. Like it mattered if even two-thirds of them were bots.
Two hundred thousand people had seen her face on the internet.
“The thread went pretty viral. She probably got a lot of those followers overnight,” Rhiannon said.
“Why? I mean, it was an unusual encounter for me, but it was, like, utterly typical to most people.”
“People love to ship other humans, real or fictional.” Rhiannon slid the phone back to Jia. “This woman spun a story, and the world went with it. They got invested in your happily-ever-after.”
Happily-ever-after? No, this was a disaster. “She took my photo,” Katrina whispered, and picked at her cuticles. Save for the vague pics on her dating profile, no one had taken her photo since she’d disappeared into relative obscurity.She didn’t have any social media. Every photo of her on the internet was from years and years ago, and that was how she preferred it.
Anonymity had been the main thing that had comforted her when she’d gone for that first drive. The assurance that no one would know who she truly was if she had a panic attack in public. The certainty that anyone who wanted to hurt Katrina King would stay far away.
“At least you had that hat on. You’re pretty unidentifiable in it,” Jia reassured her.
It did reassure her, but only for a moment. “You identified me.”
“Only after you told us about the encounter. And honestly, I live with you. I know your face.”
Katrina waited for her heart to start racing, but an odd, icy cold had settled over her. It might not be a huge pool, but other people knew her face too. And the woman—Becca, according to her username—may have given a halfhearted thought to hiding her identity, but she hadn’t pixelated her face out entirely.
She pushed her plate away. “Okay, so odds are no one will recognize me, right?”
“Right.” Jia nodded. “And these things blow over. A cat will learn how to play the tuba in like an hour and you’ll no longer be a viral phenomenon.”
A phenomenon. She tried to smile, but feared it was a baring of teeth. “Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool.” This wasn’t a big deal. It would be fine.
“I’ll put my trip off. I’ll get Lakshmi on it. We’ll figure this out.”
