Maybe it’s not his
Her?? Is this a joke?
Hole in the condom. Obviously.
I can’t peel my eyes away, my ears ringing and my heart clenching in my chest.
I don’t say anything but I see Jackson’s hand reaching for the phone. I stand up quickly out of his grasp as I keep reading. Each comment cuts like a knife, but I can’t look away.
“Rosie,” Anya says gently.
I take a deep breath and turn to my messages. I click on my mum’s contact, my dad’s,Cleo’s.
Not a single message.
I throw my phone back on the sofa and step to the window. It’s a picturesque street with barely any cars and leafy green trees lining the pavement. It’s the kind of street I pictured living on as a teenager, before I realized that I would never in a million years be able to afford the deposit for a house let alone one around here.
Cleo bought a house as soon as she graduated and it was all we talked about for months. I never figured out where she got the money from. Who has that kind of money from a fewsocial media posts? At that point, she only had a few hundred followers, nothing like the hundreds of thousands she has now. It was a few years later that mum let it slip after a few glasses of wine at lunch that she paid most of the deposit.
I couldn’t believe it. All of the school trips I missed, the holidays I wasn’t invited on because it wasn’t discounted, all the hand-me-downs I had to get from my sister, but they somehow had a house deposit for her?
I had to scrimp and save for the deposit on my flat, working all through university and afterwards to save as much as I could and giving up my pipe dream of traveling the world. Suffering through horrendous house shares before I was able to upgrade to my one bed flat, and even that comes with a shitty landlord who takes six weeks to fix any complaint whilst pocketing seventy percent of my income every month.
For my whole life, I’ve rolled over and taken it, let my sister bully me, let my mother encourage her and let my dad stick his head in the sand and ignore it all.
This is a step too far.
“Okay,” I say, straightening my back and caressing my belly. I turn back to the others, to the people who have proved that they’ve got my back more than my family will ever have. “Let’s do it, the statement, the lawyers. We can do it.”
26
JACKSON
The fury racingthrough my blood has already sunk deep into my veins and my jaw aches from how tightly clenched it is. I try to get the phone off Rosie again, but she shrugs me off, stepping out of my hold.
Her shoulders tense as she reads, and she throws the phone on the sofa, before glancing at Anya. “Can I use your shower?”
Anya jumps up. “Of course, let me get you a towel.”
She escorts Rosie from the room without a backwards glance and I collapse back in my seat, letting my legs sprawl out in front of me and my head rest on the back.
The giggles I’d heard earlier had sent hope shooting through my chest, but the detached look in Rosie’s eyes as the notifications poured in broke my heart all over again.
Like I’m defusing a bomb, I gingerly pick up her phone. I don’t pry and I’d never read anything she doesn’t want me to see, but it’s hard to miss the notifications still lighting up the screen.
“This sister,” Danny says, running his hand through his hair. “What a piece of work.”
“You have no idea,” I mutter, putting the phone face down on the coffee table.
I can’t decide what’s more egregious. The lies the woman has spewed or the fact that she’d make it all up for a few views.
Anya walks back in the room with a stormy expression on her face. “I don’t hate women, but I’ve always hated that witch.”
“What did Rosie say?”
Anya shrugs. “Nothing, she just said she wanted some time alone.” She lets Danny tug her back until she’s perched on the arm of his chair.
My phone rings in my pocket. I pull it out and grimace as my agent’s name flashes on the screen.
