“Where’s the video?” I said.
“Good question.”
But then Tony tapped the back arrow and we both saw it, at the bottom of the main page. A link that read:leila speaks.
It connected us to a YouTube video—a still of Leila staring down the camera in that same black tank top. “Jesus,” I said. The video had been posted at four p.m. today, and already it had more than five hundred thousand views. Tony’s finger hovered over thePlayarrow. “Are you ready?” he said.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Me neither,” Tony said. But he hit play anyway.
Nineteen
After the video ended, Tony and I said nothing for a long while. It was hard to look on the bright side of what we’d just seen—especially considering that the video had gained thousands more views in the past minute we’d spent watching it.
I cleared my throat. Forced a smile. “Look, maybe Melanie Joan might have to pause the memoir for a little while,” I said. “But it’s not that big a deal. People have short attention spans, and she’s…like…the Madonna of romance writers. Who is Leila Donnelly in this world?”
Tony stared straight out at the ocean, the sky pink from the setting sun. “The Taylor Swift of romance writers.”
“Oh.”
We both went quiet again. He gazed back down at his screen. I tried one of those yogic breaths. It didn’t work very well.
Tony groaned.
I looked at him.
“I just thought of something even worse,” he said.
“What?” I said.
“The video now has five hundred fifteen thousand views.”
“Yeah? And?”
“What if Melanie Joan is one of them?”
“Oh, no…” I plucked my phone out of my bag and called Spike.
He answered immediately. “Please tell me you’ve found Book Babe,” he said.
“I wish,” I said.
“Shit,” he said.
I cleared my throat. “Has Melanie Joan, uh, seen the latest?”
“What’s the latest?” Spike said.
I exhaled. “I’m hoping and praying I should take that as a no.”
“She’s sleeping,” he said. “She was spiraling, so I convinced her to take an Ambien and lie down.”
“Thank God.” I told Spike about the video in which Leila Donnelly offered a whispery condemnation of Melanie Joan, whom she called an “out-of-touch, elderly pick-me girl who weaponized her privilege against one of the most generous members of the romance community, Book Babe.” The final thirty seconds of the video consisted of a screenshot of Melanie Joan’s notorious ReadAnon comment. It had been the first time I’d ever seen it in full, and I had to say, it was an eye-popper. I considered myself pretty worldly, yet there were sexacts described in the comment that made me yearn for a whiskey and one of Melanie Joan’s water pills—just to erase the images from my memory.
“I’ve never seen the comment,” Spike said.
“Consider yourself lucky,” I said.
