CHAPTER TWO
BLAIR
“Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
My stomach drops. Glancing up from my phone, I force a smile. “Nope. Must be thinking of someone else.”
The barista—a guy about my age with sleeve tattoos and gauged ears—squints at me like I’m a puzzle he’s determined to solve. “Nah, I’m good with faces. You’re definitely familiar. Anyway, what can I get you?”
“Vanilla latte with oat milk, please. Medium.” I tap my phone against the reader, hoping the transaction will end this conversation. It doesn’t.
“Seriously, it’s gonna bug me all day. You work around here?”
I shake my head. “Nope. Guess I just have one of those faces.”
A woman waiting at the pickup counter studies me then says, “Oh! Aren’t you that girl from the article? About, you know, the creepy kids’ app?”
Every muscle in my body tenses. The coffee shop suddenly feels too small, too warm, too full of people turning to stare at me.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lie, but my voice comes out tight.
“I’m sure it was you,” the woman insists. Then, to the barista, “It was all over the news. That AI thing that was supposed to tell bedtime stories but ended up giving kids nightmares instead?”
It never even launched. No kids were harmed. The only casualty was me.
The barista snaps his fingers. “That’s it!” He shakes his head. “Man, what were you thinking?”
“Just the latte, please.” I paste on another smile, like if I’m nice enough, this will end.
It doesn’t.
“Touchy subject?” the barista asks.
The woman at the pickup counter waves a hand at me. “I’m telling you, it’s her. I’m sure of it.”
A guy at a nearby table glances over and whispers something to his friend, who looks over too.
There are low mumbles in the line behind me. The woman at the counter pulls out her phone. “Let me find that article again. I swear it’s her.”
Suddenly it’s like I’m on trial and the coffee shop is the jury. That’s when something inside me snaps.
“You don’t have to find the article!” My voice cracks across the shop, louder than I intended. “Yes, it’s me! Congratulations, mystery solved.”
The woman forgets all about her phone and stares at me open-mouthed. The barista blinks. Some guy goes quiet mid-whisper. But I’m rolling now, and my words spill out faster than I can catch them.
“You think I wanted to work on that stupid app? You think that’s why I went into children’s publishing? No. I love books. Books! Always have. But my boss, he had this shiny new idea, and he wouldn’t shut up about how it was the future, how it’d look great on my résumé. So suddenly I’m sitting in meetings with a bunch of developers I’ve never met, pretending I knowwhat the hell they’re talking about. Me. A book editor. With zero tech background.
“But even if I wasn’t an expert, I knew enough to know the damn thing wasn’t ready. I begged my boss for more testing, more safeguards, but no! He wanted buzz, he wanted headlines, and so journalists got a pre-release version. One of them fed it some ridiculous gothic word salad, andbam! A tale Stephen King would’ve been proud of.”
My hands are shaking, and even as the words fly out, a horrified part of me knows I should shut up. But I can’t.
“Do the articles mention how the journalist set up the app to fail? Like, what kid asks for a story about ‘encounters with nocturnal phantasmagorical manifestations’? But no, there’s no mention of that, nor of my boss, who dreamed the whole thing up. Instead, my face has been plastered everywhere like I’m the Wicked Witch of Bedtime Stories.”
The coffee shop is silent now. Even the espresso machine’s hiss has given up.
“The app’s been scrapped. I’ve been fired. And I’ll never work in children’s publishing again. Not such a great addition to my résumé after all. But my boss? Threw me under the bus and walked away clean. Left me the villain of the story.”
A baby starts crying somewhere behind me, and the sound snaps me back to reality. I look around at the stunned faces staring at me. The barista, whose eyebrows look like they’re about to make a break for freedom right off his forehead. The woman who recognised me, who’s practically radiating regret, like she knows she lit the match that set me off. A businessman who pauses with his coffee halfway to his lips, as wide-eyed as if I’d just yelled, “Tax audit!”
