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Epilogue
SLoane
Three months later...
I hadn’t heard from Gia in two days.
I hadn’t seen her in longer than that.
Three weeks was the time we agreed upon for her to tie up loose ends back home. All she had to do was break her apartment lease, put a bunch of stuff in storage for the time being, and ship the rest. Not exactly easy. I wanted to help her but I couldn’t take that much time away from Bessie during peak season.
Now those weeks had passed, plus two days of zero phone calls. Island postal hadn’t had a shipment for me in a while, certainly nothing from Gia.
What fuckery was going on? Where was she?
I had the house ready, and the guest house turned into a studio for Gia so she could have her own space to work.
It took less time to find the culprit behind the leaked messages than it did for Gia to get back to me.
We had a plan.
There’s not a chance in hell she had second thoughts. Gia could have changed her mind the minute Todd remembered seeing someone near my locker holding a cell phone that looked exactly like mine a few days after the night Gia stayed in my guest house.
I’m not the most tech savvy guy, but I can’t be blamed for thinking my phone would be secure enough in my own locker in the locked employee break room.
Apparently not.
Turned out the asshole from the boardwalk who was giving Gia a hard time, made good on his threat. He slipped a little cash to one of the security guards who escorted him off the property that night to snoop through my shit and find some dirt.
I learned two important things along with that revelation:
One, Eliza, our head of security, was strong enough to grab a grown man by his collar and belt loops and hurl him out the front entrance onto his ass. Goodbye security guard.
And two, password protection on cell phones is a legitimate application and highly encouraged if you plan to talk sexy to your girl online… or just at all.
I know that now.
I wanted to make their asses pay, and Gia definitely could have done it, but she chose not to. I respected her decision to avoid having our names dragged further through the tabloids just to prove some petty asshole with a little dick complex had it out for her.
It was good enough that he was permanently banned from Ember Island.
Because no matter what a court of law decided, we couldn’t erase the messages or what people thought of them.
And there was a fair share of her followers that judged Gia harshly.
As could be expected, she took it in stride. Because part of her entire outlook on life, aside from teaching women to be confident in their skin, was reminding them that everyone has problems.
Even her.
As she’d reminded me many times since then, “You can’t control what other people do. You can only control how you react to them.”
Gia chose grace. And she chose me.
So after all the embarrassment and the mudslinging, the dropped followers, and the onslaught of new followers that came to support her, Gia decided to stay on the island with me. It’d been such a wild ride in a short time, up and down, just like our coaster.
But that didn’t tell me why she wasn’t here, where she was supposed to be.
I paced the living room, checking my phone once again.
