“I mean, if I was married, and you found out my husband was cheating on me, wouldn’t you tell me?”
“Would you want me to tell you?”
“Hell, yes!” Shea’s eyes were wide, and her eyebrows rose toward her hairline. “I’d be pissed at you if you didn’t.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Why?”
“Because how the hell do I tell Andi this?” Cherry pushed herself up so she was sitting and grudgingly took a cracker. When Shea didn’t respond, she said, “I’m serious. What do I say? Specifically. Like, what words do I use?”
Shea sighed and gave her a nudge to move over. When they were both sitting side by side on Cherry’s bed, backs against the headboard, Shea shook her head. “I think you just be as gentle as possible. Right?”
“I mean, I guess?”
“But you have to tell her before the article comes out. The lastthing you want is for her to be caught off guard, scrolling along on her phone, and catch it in her mentions. Or worse, find out via a comment from a follower. Which is most likely how it would happen, right?”
Unfortunately, Shea was right about that. The speed with which information—especially negative information—traveled online was staggering. There was no way Andi wouldn’t hear the news as soon as the article posted. No, Shea was right. She was Andi’s friend, and as such, she needed to protect her as best she could. She had no idea when Ellis would deliver the article, and if she already had, when it would be posted. Realistically, that could happen at any moment.
“Goddamn it,” she muttered. “I hate this. I hate all of it.”
Shea wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “I know, sweetie. I’m sorry.” And if there was a perfect place for her to insert anI told you so, it was right then. But she didn’t.
Cherry leaned her head against Shea’s shoulder. “I’m such a fool.”
“We all are at some point. I still love you,” Shea said with a squeeze, and she pressed a kiss to her temple.
They sat there in silence for several minutes, just being together. Cherry’s brain had been a whirlwind of thoughts and excuses and blame and pleas and everything in between since lunchtime that day.
Shea reached toward the plate and grabbed a cracker topped with cheese. “Eat.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She put the cracker in her mouth, chewed it, and hardly tasted it at all. When her phone pinged a text announcement, her head snapped toward Shea’s. Could it be Ellis? Finally?
Slowly, she picked up her phone and turned it so the screen faced her. Not Ellis. Lila.
Shea was looking over her shoulder and blurted, “Holy shit, I totally forgot about her. But…didn’t you ask her not to contact you?”
“Yup.” Cherry sighed. “The one I want to contact me won’t. The one I don’t want to deal with is texting. What the actual fuck, Shea?”
Shea squeezed Cherry again. “Oh, honey, you’ve got a hot mess going on, don’t you?”
Cherry set the phone down with a groan because truer words? Never spoken.
* * *
Michaela’s room was quiet.
Not that it wasn’t always quiet. But usually, Ellis talked more to her. Or Kendra came in to chat. Or Evan hung with her for a while, and they talked. But Kendra was off that night, and she’d texted briefly with Evan earlier, and she just wasn’t in the mood for chitchat.
Cherry had sent a few texts apologizing. God, so much apologizing. Which Ellis both appreciated and was annoyed by. Because why do such a thing in the first place? If Cherry hadn’t lied, if she hadn’t hidden a huge part of her life from her, she’d have nothing to be falling all over herself apologizing for now. So, yeah. Ellis was irritated.
The article was written. All she had to do was give it a quick proof and send it to the editor. Turned out that Cherry’s friend Andi—that was her name, finally!—was pretty well-known in social media circles. A few hundred thousand followers on TikTok, more on Instagram.Shewas the news here. Seemed her vids about being a lesbian in today’s world prominently featured her wife and how happy they were, how wonderful their life together was, and they offered marriage advice. Ellis had scanned Andi’s socials for over an hour. The vids had descriptions likeHow to listen to your partner better,How to make a romantic dinner in less than thirty minutes,Keeping the lines of communication open, andHonesty is the best policy. She’d snorted at that last one, said to Mikey, “Yeah, Cherry must’ve missed that one.” She was relieved that Cherry wouldn’t be mentioned in the article because the focus of it was on Andi, not her fellow influencers. It was one time Cherry would probably be glad she only had a fraction of Andi’s followers.
“Seriously, how do you toss your advice around like that and not know your wife is cheating on you?”
She knew she was concentrating her irritation on Andi’s situation in order to keep from looking more closely at Cherry’s. She was aware. She’d spent much more than an hour on Cherry’s page. Cherry on Top, it was called, and apparently, that was her brand. Ellis had to admit that she did a nice job with photos and vids, and she sat there in Mikey’s room watching video after video, scanning photo after photo, and the thing she noticed the most was that none of them even seemed like the Cherry she knew.
Or did they?
