I force my fingers to move over the keyboard and write my fucking book, but I’m at war with my brain, trying to get it to focus and stop imagining another world where someone might want me. It’s a fantasy—not real. Words flow through my fingers, but none of it makes sense. It’s all staggered and messy and awful because I’m not a good author at all. No one wants to read my books, so why am I bothering with this?
In the end, make-believe wins—not that I ever stood a chance against my own delusions. Up here, in the clouds, I’m safe. Leo is there, smiling down at me and telling me how utterly perfect I am. There’s no mom or dad to make me feel like shit, or men who make my skin crawl. Here, Leo is Blake, and I get my happily ever after.
The document on my screen blurs. Then the computer goes dark with sleep. All the while my phone keeps vibrating every few minutes. Again. And again.
And again.
Twisted hope blossoms in me with every notification that it might be Leo—like it is in my dreams. He finally realized we were meant to be together, and he knows me just as well as I know him, and he’s come to whisk me away into the sunset.
Our conversation thread is the first thing I check when I wake up, and the last thing I see before I go to bed. Leohasto know that we have a connection. A soul-deep one that transcends distance and time. It can’t be one-sided. I refuse to believe it when clearly he’s seen my message and has been thinking of me—why else would his friends know about me?
This is just one big misunderstanding, that’s all.
His friends are the ones who’ve taken it too far, thinking they can push me around like my parents do. It makes them feel in control. My parents want a quiet, well-behaved girl who has five kids, dresses up for her husband, and makes dinner for her family every day without complaint.
Leo’s friends? I’m not sure what exactly it is they want, but I’m not going to take it.
The first comment at the top of my notifications is—predictably—Jack’s. The lone soldier left on this crusade to tarnish my space. He was smart enough to use spare accounts, but it’s undoubtedly him. Correct punctuation, capital letters, and no emojis or abbreviations.
He flip-flops between being a perverted pig and outright degrading me. I’m not sure which I hate more.
Jack: I’ll show you what a real man looks like.
If they want to turn me into a laughingstock, then fine. Leo is going to be mine, one way or another. This—this is just a hiccup. A mishap or an accident. This isn’t fatal. He’ll make it up to me—I know he will. He’s a good man.
I go into Settings and systematically unblock everyone who came at me that night. Fuck them. If they want to boost the engagement on my posts, they can go for it. Hopefully the media will pick it up, and they’ll get into shit for being creeps.
If not, they can keep commenting and pay my fucking rent.
Steeling myself, I click into the group chat I’ve been avoiding for days—the same group chat that Leo is in but has conveniently stayed utterly silent in and left me for dead. I scroll to the very start and take a screenshot of every photo and message they sent, all the members of this stupid group chat, including those who tried to leave. Then I print it all out and lay it on my floor.
I grab the list of his team members and the profiles of the people I thought might be Leo’s friends based on prior sleuthing I’ve done, cross-referencing to see who engaged in this bullshit and who steered clear. An hour ticks by as I do my deep dive into everyone’s life.
The guys who frequently make an appearance in Leo’s stories are nowhere to be seen in this chat. Not even his best friend, Mitchell, partook—in fact, he immediately removed himself the second he was added.
It also strikes me as odd that the time of the screenshots of my personal account shows they were taken at five o’clock. They started messaging me at midnight. Which means that Leo and his friends—no, just his friends—sat on this information for hours. They plotted and schemed and planned how they were going to bring me down and make me feel like I’m less than them for what I do.
All it took was alcohol and a celebration party.
The truth stings like a bitch.
But then his message... All of it makes my head spin.
Sorry?He doesn’t justgetto be fucking sorry. But he will be if it turns out he was part of it. He’s going to regret ever thinkinghe could get rid of me like that. If Leo wants me to be the villain in this story, then I will be.
He’ll finally see me as something more than a desperate nobody who wants his attention. Everything I need to know is plastered all over his social media.
It doesn’t take long to find out who the girl in the photo was. I’ve already looked through his verified followers list more than once.
It takes even less time to figure out where Leo lives. He used to save his stories onto his page. He stopped about a year ago. And as I said, I take my own screenshots.
When I first saw the picture of the Sold sticker that was slapped on the For Sale sign in front of a brand-new house, I fought the urge to check dates and addresses against the realtor’s prior listings. Back then, I had an unacknowledged message and hopeless dreams.
Shit happened. Now, there’s nothing holding me back.
I go through my image library until I find the screenshot where his sister is standing beside the sign, holding up a giant bottle of champagne and pointing at Leo at the very edge of the frame. There’s the realtor’s name and company, plus pictures of the listing on that sign.
Which means those pictures will still be online.
