I stare at the text for a long time, hating that he still thinks it’s okay to use that nickname on me. Then I get up, stroll to the bedroom, yank open his side of the wardrobe, and start stuffing garbage bags. Shirts. Trousers. A jacket I bought him for his birthday that he wore once and said wasn’t really his style. Then I haul it all to the backyard, both bags, and dump them into the firepit near the back fence.
I go back inside for matches.
Extreme? Probably. Therapist-approved? Definitely not. But I watch the fabric catch and curl and blacken, the smoke rising into the evening sky, and for the first time since this morning, the tightness in my chest loosens by a fraction.
My phone buzzes again. Louis.
Well, if you wanted to make an impression online for your book, congratulations. But you could’ve warned me before dragging my name through the mud too.
What the hell?
I stare at the screen. Read it again.
I open my browser, which I almost never do because the internet and I have an arrangement where we avoid each other and we’re both happier for it. My notifications are a wall of red.Tagged. Mentioned. Quoted. Shared. The numbers don’t make sense. Three hundred notifications. Four hundred. Climbing.
I tap the first one.
It’s a clip. Fifteen seconds of my interview, cut and compressed and stripped of everything except the worst possible moment. My face, tight and nervous, mouth moving, voice harder than I remember it being.
“I think there’s a difference between someone who has actually trained and put in the work in real kitchens and someone who just films themselves making pasta in nice lighting. It’s not really the same thing, is it?”
The caption reads:Cookbook author says food bloggers aren’t real cooks.
My stomach drops through the floor.
I scroll, my thumb moving before my brain can intervene. The comments load in waves. Dozens. Hundreds.
Who does this woman think she is?
Love how she gatekeeps cooking while selling a book full of her grandma’s recipes. Lol.
One-star review incoming. Already bought it. Already returning it.
Imagine going on TV and insulting millions of creators because you went to culinary school. Sit down.
My inbox. I open it and immediately wish I hadn’t. Hate mail from strangers—people who have never met me, never read my book, never heard my name before today—and they’re furious with me. Some of them are cruel, one saying I deserve to die. Another calls me a snob with a pretty face and nothing behind it. A third is a paragraph of insults so specific and personal that I physically flinch and drop my phone.
“Oh, shit! Why did I say that in the interview?”
Louis’s clothes are still burning while my career is doing the same.
My phone rings. Katie. She was going to come over with Chinese and watch a terrible movie with me, but I can’t do that, so I messaged her, canceling it. She calls me again, but I don’t answer. Then my mom rings. My sister. A number I don’t recognize. I reject every call. My hands are shaking too hard to hold the phone steady, my vision blurring with tears I can’t stop. My chest constricts until my lungs feel crushed.
I put out the fire with the hose, then stumble inside and barely make it to the sink before I’m sick. There’s nothing graceful about it. Nothing dramatic. Just my body turning against me because too many people have seen me, judged me, decided what I meant, and now the whole world is reaching for me through that phone.
When it finally passes, I slide down onto the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet. The tiles are cold beneath my palms. The house is too quiet, while my phone keeps buzzing with notifications I will never, ever open.
Maybe Louis was right. Maybe I can’t even pretend to be the right version of myself for one hour on television.
I press my hands hard against the tile and try to breathe through the shame lodged in my throat, but it’s too big. Too heavy. Outside, smoke rises over the house, carrying the last scraps of today with it.
And I sit there, hollowed out and shaking, wondering how one wrong sentence managed to burn down everything I had left.
1
CLAIRE
Four Months Later
