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I drilled him with a dirty look. But he wasn’t wrong. He had.
“I’m inviting the press. People, Us Weekly. Great opportunity to put these rumors to bed.”
Ordinarily, I would have rolled with it. But I hesitated. The hack, the day, the song—some of it, all of it, had gotten to me. And I was feeling . . . something.
“Danny doesn’t want publicity tonight. He specifically said.”
“And I care about what Danny wants, why?”
I shot Ryan a look. I wasn’t in the mood to stroke his ego—to pretend he’d won the latest battle of work husband versus real husband.
And I didn’t want to upset Danny, especially when birthdays were a big deal around here. We’d been together since we were twenty-one, college sweethearts. And every year, we tried to top the year before for each other. Danny was already irritated that I’d peeked at his email and seen the details, asked him to make a few changes to all that planning (to the guest list and the menu and the time—I did keep the venue).
“Look, you can pretend you had no idea,” Ryan said.
That was the last thing I wanted to do. While I had become somewhat of a seasoned liar over the years—a job requirement—I used to be a very honest person. And that was the person Danny knew—the one he had fallen in love with. Whenever I tried to stretch the truth with him, he would often see through it. And I didn’t want to fight.
“Handle it however you want,” Ryan said. “But we have to do this, okay?”
“Fine, whatever, just keep it under control.”
“When don’t I?” He paused, considering. “This morning notwithstanding.”
“Ryan, we have to deal with him.”
“Danny?” he said, confused.
“The hacker.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m dealing with him! Five people at the studio are devoting all their time to figuring out which weirdo living with his mother in Idaho who jerked off to your videos one too many times did this thing.”
“Gross.”
Ryan sucked down the juice. “I aim to please.”
“Uh . . . guys?” Violet waltzed into the kitchen. “Amber is weighing in . . .”
Amber was Amber Rucci, aka Toast of the Town. A fellow culinary YouTube star. All of her dishes used toast as their base. Thick, old-fashioned brioche; salted, grainy rye. Some of her recipes were as simple as homemade almond butter on burnt brioche. Did that even count as a recipe? It counted enough that she was beloved. She was also young and attractive—and the host of the second-most popular YouTube cooking show, tracking only behind A Little Sunshine. Years ago, she had reached out and sent me an array of kitchen utensils (Let’s get cooking!!) to cement something like a friendship between us. I was more than happy to play nice too and sent her back a knife set (Your stove or mine?). Our “friendship” led to joint appearances on each other’s shows and a New York Times “Night Out” piece. On the menu was my tomato pie, accompanied by her avocado and mint toast.
Now, apparently, she wanted the world to know she wasn’t a fair-weather friend.
Believe in the power of Sunshine! #chefsunite #loveandpepper
She linked to a photograph of us on Instagram, preparing dinner in her kitchen.
Violet put her phone away. “That’s nice, right?” she said. “Why didn’t she email personally, though?”
“What good would that do?” Ryan said. “No one would have seen it!”
“I hate toast,” I said.
Ryan smiled. “There’s my girl!” he said.
“Violet, I need you to get a few tweets out in the next fifteen minutes,” I said. “Something like . . .‘Hello, guys, this is Sunshine (the real Sunshine), what a morning!’ You understand.”
She headed toward the living room. “Already on it.”
Ryan called out after her. “Use one of those inspirational quotes on Instagram about how scary it is to have someone else speaking for you, pretending to be you. How strong you feel using your own voice again. Something.”
