Maybe someone had hacked him. Or copied his tone. Or—God—maybe one of his friends had made the account as a joke. A cruel, awful joke.
It couldn’t be Dean.
Fiona's mouth went dry. The lights seemed too bright suddenly, the faces around her blurring into a sea of expectant grins.
Her private moments. Her silly thoughts. Her earnest confessions.
And another:
My wife just spent 3 hours deciding whether 10-year-olds deserve full credit for spelling "elephant" phonetically. Meanwhile, I closed a six-figure deal in 30 minutes.
The nausea hit like a wave—sharp, humiliating, impossible to stop. For a second she thought she might throw up right there, into her lap.
These weren’t jokes.
These comments were hurtful.
Someone had turned her into content.
Someone who thought she was silly. Soft. Stupid.
Her breath caught. The room wobbled, like someone had tilted it.
She didn’t want to look at him. Because if she looked at him, and he was still smiling… if he was still proud of this?—
Her stomach twisted.
No. No, he loved her. Hetoldher he loved her. He kissed her forehead in the morning. He made her tea at night. He held her like she mattered.
The room kept moving around her—laughter, conversation, the clink of glasses—but she felt suspended outside of it, watching herself from a distance as her world collapsed in real time.
He wouldn’t do this. He couldn’t.
The air in the room suddenly felt thick, syrupy, like she was drowning in it. Her vision narrowed—the faces staring at her, the phone screen glowing with her humiliation, Dean on the stage still looking at her.
A sound escaped her throat—not quite a gasp, not quite a sob. Something raw and animal that she'd never heard herself make before.
The woman beside her was saying something, but Fiona couldn't hear over the roaring in her ears. The sound was deafening, like standing next to a waterfall, drowning out everything except the steady thrum of her pulse and the sick twist of realization in her gut.
Her private moments. Her earnest confessions. Her vulnerable thoughts.
Everyone had been laughing.
At her.
For months.
Years.
Her eyes burned. She wanted to throw the phone across the table.
But she couldn’t look away.
“She sounds exhausting tbh.”
“This is why you don’t marry small-town girls”
“You sure she’s not twelve?”
