"Fuck! It posted." The spinner vanishes. "It's posted. Okay. Now I can delete it quickly, now it'll let me —" I take the phone back from her and find the post. There it is, live, on Dawson's Sanctuary: a thumbnail of Maggie walking innocently into her own kitchen, the first frame, before she set the phone down. It looks like nothing but it sounds like everything. I hit the menu, and Delete, and Are you sure, and YES, OBVIOUSLY I'M SURE,and the screen thinks about it for a year and a half, and then the post is gone.
I stare at the empty grid where it was. "It's gone. I deleted it. It's gone." I'm shaking. "How long was it up?"
Maggie looks at me. "Thirty seconds? Less?"
"Thirty seconds." I press the heel of my hand to my forehead. "And the thumbnail's just you walking into a kitchen, you can't see anything, it's the ceiling for four-and-a-half minutes. Even if someone clicked it right away they'd just get a light fixture and —" I stop. "Fuck. The audio."
Maggie's eyes widen and there's nothing I can do to stop her from spiralling because I'm spiralling myself.
I don't tell her the worst part. The part I know and she doesn't, because she's never lived inside a platform like I have. Thirty seconds is enough. If even one person was scrolling at the right moment — and statistically, in any given thirty-second window, plenty of them are — they could have screen-recorded it. Reposted it to their Story. Saved it to their camera roll. There are entire apps designed to grab content the second it goes up. Deleting the original doesn't matter if it's already been copied.
And then my phone buzzes, and an Instagram message pops up. It's from Ruthie, and it says,Honey did you mean to post that?
62
MAGGIE
Ihaven't slept for a minute. I lay rigid in the dark listening to Sloane not sleeping either, both of us pretending for the other's sake, until around five we gave up the pretense and got up.
There was nothing to do last night and there's nothing to do now, and that's the part eating through me. I'm good in a crisis when the crisis has a shape — a sick animal, a storm, a fence down. You do the thing. You haul the water, you call the vet, you drive through the night. But this has no shape I can get my hands around. It already happened and it's already out and the helplessness of it is worse than fear. I keep standing up to do something, then realize there's nothing to do and sitting back down.
By six I'm making coffee because my hands need a job. I bring two mugs out to the porch where Sloane's curled in a chair with her knees pulled up, looking as distressed as I feel. The light's coming up over the paddock and I opened the barns early, but the animals were so confused by that that they're only starting to show their faces now.
I hand Sloane a mug and sit next to her at the table.
"If Ruthie saw it," I say — heard it, I mean — "then other people did too. Ruthie's not the only follower awake at ten at night." I turn to look at her. "How many, do you think? Realistically."
Sloane picks up her phone off the arm of the chair. I watch her thumb hover over it, watch the screen wake, and even from here I can see the wall of it — the little red badges stacked up the side, numbers high enough to make me nauseous just from the shape of them. She doesn't open one.
"It depends how fast people screenshot," she says. "One person screen-records it and it doesn't matter that I deleted it anymore — it still lives out there, somewhere and it's not mine to take down." She swallows hard. "From the notification numbers — and I'm not opening them — I'd say a few hundred saw it go up. Maybe more. Enough that some of them kept it."
"How can you possibly know?" I wrap my arms around myself. "Has this happened to you before?"
"Once."
"It's happened to you before and this is the lesson you took from it?"
"Hey." Her chin lifts, and there's a flicker of the old fire in it. "In my defense, you had just bent me over your kitchen counter. I was not, at that moment, in a fit state to think straight. My higher functions were offline and you did that to me. You don't get to fuck someone senseless and then hold them responsible for what their hands do afterward."
Despite everything I nearly laugh. "That's your legal defense, is it?"
She shrugs. "Diminished capacity."
"Diminished capacity." I sip my coffee. "What happened the last time?"
"It was nothing like this." She picks at the seam of the robe, the fight going back out of her as fast as it came. "I was at a club,very drunk, and the camera was open and I didn't realize, and I posted about thirty seconds of the floor. My own feet, the carpet, me talking nonsense to Sita over the music. People laughed at me for a day. Someone made a little meme out of it. And then it was gone, because it was nothing — it was a woman filming her shoes. It wasn't this."
"No," I say. "It wasn't this."
We sit with that as there's nothing else to say. Out in the paddock Hank ambles toward the fence for his morning apple, completely indifferent to the fact that the bottom's fallen out of everything.
"I'm sorry," Sloane says. Her voice has gone thin. "Maggie, I'm so sorry. If I'd had any idea the camera was still on I'd never — I would never do this to you, you have to know that, I'd never have —"
"Stop," I say. "It's not your fault. I was right there and I'm the one who took your phone from you while you were filming." I shake my head. "Neither of us was thinking. It was an accident and sitting here deciding whose accident it was more doesn't change a single thing about what's about to happen once the world wakes up."
She nods, teary-eyed, and turns her gaze to the paddock. I have to look away from her, because the worst of it isn't the town, the gossip, or the strangers with their saved copy. This woman spent weeks clawing her way out of being a punchline, finally got the whole valley rooting for her, and now she'll have to face it all over again. And not only that, she just outed herself to the whole world, and not by choice.
I check the time. Six thirty. And I finally think of something I can actually do. Something I can get out in front of instead of waiting for it to land on us.
