“Poppy, are you awake yet?”
I groan, flopping over in bed as my head pulses unpleasantly. I’ve been half-asleep for hours now, cursing whisky and Jack Hartman and my own stupid self while trying to forget last night. Maybe if I don’t answer, Julia will leave me alone.
“Mom and Dad are downstairs,” she continues.
Fuck. I stumble to my feet, blowing my hair out of my eyes, and yank open the door. “What?”
Julia takes a step back, looking me over with a critical eye and wrinkled nose. Even though it’s a Saturday, she’s wearing a linen sheath dress and pearl earrings. Her wedding ring, an heirloom from Caroline’s family, glints obnoxiously on her left hand. “You slept in that dress? You couldn’t at least put on pajamas?”
“I was drunk.” I cross my arms. “It happens.”
To me, at least. I bet Julia has never gotten so drunk she couldn’t remember how to find her way out of a dress. And if she ever did, I wouldn’t know about it, because there are four years between us. By the time I was old enough to have any kind of social life, she was in college.
“At least you didn’t throw up all over it.” She rubs her temples. “This is a mess, Pops.”
As much as I’d like to forget last night, my brain isn’t that kind.I bite the inside of my cheek as the scene plays in my mind again, movie-like. The breakup would have been one thing, but my reaction takes it to a different level of embarrassment. Throw in Jack’s fight with Bret Whittaker, and the whole thing looks like a poorly acted sideshow.
The one silver lining is that I woke up in my own bed, so clearly, I didn’t add to the mess with a drunken display somewhere public. I turn around, lifting my crumpled hair. Julia sighs but helps me with my zipper.
“I thought Mom was visiting Aunt Shelia,” I mumble as I look for something acceptable to wear.
As usual, my room is a black hole, with clothes and shoes flung in every direction, plus moving boxes from my last apartment. I’ve been back to living at our parents’ place in Rye since before I met Ryan, thanks to an incident where my apartment autopay expired and I missed the late notices they kept shoving in my mailbox. Before last night, I’d been looking forward to a future in SoHo with Ryan. An excuse to finally unpack those boxes.
Straight up forgetting to pay her rent? That’s another thing Julia would never do. I know it was an ADHD-related fuck-up, but it was mortifying. Especially when I called Dad to help me move out.
“She took the redeye back,” Julia says.
“What?”
“The video is everywhere.” Julia brushes her wavy hair, a darker blonde than mine, over her shoulder. Her tone takes on a clipped edge. “Start to finish. Tagging you, Pastiche, the Winfield Group—”
I finally find a sweatshirt, the oversize kind I’d never wear in public—or put on my Instagram feed. I yank it over my head. “Did you know that Dad fired Jack?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Don’t you remember him? He catered your wedding.”
“Of course I do.” Her mouth thins out. “You’re both memes, you know. The internet is having a fun time debating which one of you had a worse night.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
I scramble toward the bed, upending the pillows to search for myphone. Of course it’s dead; I was too fuzzy headed to plug it in last night. Julia holds out hers with a grim expression.
A quick scroll shows me she’s right. There are photos. Videos. A gleeful TMZ article praising Ryan for cutting me loose, and far too many memes of my shocked face. I watch a looped video of myself running out of the restaurant enough times to make my head spin.
And for every three posts about me, there’s one about Jack, too. The hot chef who lost it during service.
I blink rapidly as I stare down at a TikTok declaring me and Jack “a match made in hell.” If only they knew what happened after.
You ever want round two, you’ll know where to find me.
Yeah, in hell.
I shake my head to get rid of the memory. I’m sure he’s halfway to Florida by now.
I hand Julia her phone after I see the first comment calling me a cunt who didn’t deserve Ryan in the first place. A rogue sniffle escapes me.
