KATRINA: Have you seen Instagram?
KATRINA: Jade. Call me.
KATRINA: NOW.
My fingers tremble as I pull up the app.
I don't have to search for long. It's everywhere—tagged, shared, spreading like a virus through the accounts of people I vaguely know from high school, from the neighborhood, from my author network.
A photo of Devon and Mila at the conference. It looks intimate. His head is tilted toward her, her hand on his arm. Except that the lighting is wrong, and the angle makes it look like more than it was.
The caption reads:When your husband's other woman shows up pregnant, and he swears nothing happened. Some people will believe anything. Poor Jade Locke.
Then, mypen nameis tagged in bold letters for everyone to see.
This is who she really is.
Dizziness washes over me as I try to breathe through this. Somehow, Mila has found my fucking pen name.How is she doing this?!
Comments are already flooding in.
Omg is this real?
Ialways thought he was too hot for her.
Didn't she write that friends-to-lovers book?
Guess she couldn't keep her own man.
Tears stream down my cheeks.
The phone slips from my hands and clatters against the bar. Someone is making a sound—a horrible, wounded noise—and it takes me a moment to realize it's coming from me.
She's trying to destroy me publicly. My reputation. My career. Everything I've built.
I grab the phone and call Devon, my hands trembling so violently I can barely hold it.
"Baby? What's wrong?"
"She's posting about us online. About you and her. Tagging my author account, exposing my real name and my pen name.” I'm sobbing now, ugly and broken. "She's telling everyone I'm stupid for believing you. Devon, she's?—"
"I'm coming. Stay where you are. I'm coming right now."
The line goes dead, and I sink to the floor behind the bar, pressing my back against the cold wood.
Those comments—too hot for her—the familiar shit seeping into wounds I thought had healed.
I wrap my arms around my knees and wait for Devon.
The threat isn't hypothetical anymore.
It's here, and it's spreading, and I don't know how to stop it.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
JADE
Devon finds me on the floor behind the bar, mascara streaked down my cheeks, my phone still clutched in my claw-like grip.
