Page 10 of While You Were Trending

“If Freida’s willing?—”

“You talked to Freida? Freida Rhodes?” Mabel’s voice has gone cold as ice.

Defensive.

Protective.

She knows about my mother’s favoritism and the ways Mom’s reality show destroyed my childhood and how dear ol’ mom mismanaged what should’ve been my paychecks from the show.

I suck in a deep breath and stumble into the kitchen.

Thanks to my hangover, the chairs around the table fuzz at the edges and shift up and down like they’re on an ancient black-and-white TV having reception troubles instead of actually here in person. The black-and-white tiles on the floor resemble those puzzles I did as a kid when I’d have to cross my eyes to see the image beneath, and the coffee maker on the counter beneath the antique cabinets is laughing at me.

I breathe and hold myself steady, gripping the wooden doorframe until the room quits moving.

“Freida’s a star,” the producer’s saying. She has short-cropped white hair and is wearing a business blazer over jeans. She’s in a kitchen chair across from Mabel. What’s her name again? Stevie? Georgie? Fanny? “The double star power of Declan and Freida together?—”

“Absolutely not,” comes from a deep voice to my left.

A deep voice belonging to a dark-haired man dressed in jeans and a blue button-down rolled up his forearms, who’s leaning against the counter beside the fridge, wearing the normal scowl that he always switched to anytime he’d spot me.

The man hated me.

I still don’t know what I did to him, but the entire time I dated my ex, he hated me.

I used to laugh—bitterly—whenever I’d hear someone say it was surprising he was so good as an enforcer on the ice, given how nice he was off it.

The worst part of how much he hated me was that hewasnice.

To everyone else.

Hence why my plans while he’s here are to avoid him entirely.

But the minute my mother’s brought into discussions of this documentary—that’s when I have to be involved too.

Hungover or not.

“Hang on, let’s not be hasty in saying no,” the producer says. The hell is her name? Charlie? Frankie? Viper?

Mabel crosses her arms. “Freida Rhodes was here as a wedding guest. She has no place in the winery operations, so it makes no sense for her to be involved in the documentary.”

“We can find a role for her.”

“I said no,” Declan says. “You bring Freida in, I’m out.”

“You have a contract,” the producer says without looking at him.

“A contract for me to do a documentary. Not a reality show.”

“Conflict sells.”

Mabel’s foot taps under the table. “We’re three women with limited experience in the wine industry letting a retired hockey player help us. We’ll have plenty of conflict already.”

“You’re rebranding,” the producer says.Eddie. That’s her name,Eddie. “She’s a marketing genius. She could?—”

“You’ve already been told no multiple times,” I say. “Drop it.”

Mabel glances sharply my way, her head moving so fast that it makes the slush of my brains shift as if I moved my head that quickly. She’s my age, but she has the air of a fifty-year-old woman who’s run out of fucks. She’s in her usual all-black outfit and cat’s-eye glasses. Her dark hair is tied up in a ponytail, and she’s silently asking me all of the normal questions a best friend would ask.