My hands shook so badly I set the phone down on the comforter before I dropped it.
It wasn’t just gossip. It was a campaign. A deliberate attempt to build public sympathy faster than the truth could catch up.
And for a few hours, if I’m honest, it worked on me—not in the sense that I believed them, but in the way public lies can still invade your body. I felt hot, then sick, then so furious I had to sit on the floor of my own bedroom and breathe through it. Not because strangers thought badly of me. Because Ethan was trying to erase what he had done by replacing it with a cleaner story in which I was the villain and he was the man brave enough to seek joy.
He had always hated the fact that facts existed.
That afternoon I called David.
Every woman should have at least one friend whose brain is so technical and so morally uncomplicated that when you say, “Someone is lying about me online,” his first response is not, “Ignore it,” but, “Let’s see what proof they forgot to hide.”