Page 50 of Wide-Eyed


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Does Mike know about this?

I nearly dropped my phone in my haste to reply.

Why would that matter?

I held my breath as I waited for her response.

Mike has no chill. That Bossi guy better hope my brother never figures out how to renew his passport.

Mike doesn’t care about me like that. He said I was too much banana for one milkshake.


I watched her typing bubbles, feeling lightheaded suddenly.

A) my brother is a doofus. B) he will still flip his lid. It’s the principle of the thing.

Right. Mike had said as much himself. So had Dean and Kev, and now Caroline, too. Mike was everyone’s self-appointed white knight. This wasn’t about me. He said himself he had an overdeveloped sense of justice.

Yesterday wasn’t the first time he’d punched someone on a woman’s behalf. It probably wasn’t even the first time this month. That was just how Mike was.

The realization pulled a heavy sigh from me.

Dean met my eyes in the rearview mirror. His expression might have been concern—it was hard to tell with Dean. All of his expressions were kind of scowl-y. I copied the thumbs-up gesture Mike always did, but I did it quickly and with both hands, which must have been overkill, because instead of looking reassured, Dean looked alarmed.

I understand now why you wanted to escape to Aotearoa. I’m glad Mike suggested it.

I didn’t know where to begin verbalizing everything I felt hearing that. Relief, gratitude, guilt. The overwhelming urge to open-mouth wail.

So I didn’t try.

I’m sorry that this happened to you.

No. That makes it sounds like a random lightning bolt that no one can be blamed for. Do-over.

I’m sorry a powerful, scheming, piece of shit man manipulated you. You didn’t do anything wrong, Lyssa my sweet moonbeam.

The tears spilled over then.

Because Caroline was wrong. I’d done everything wrong. Every single thing. And realizing that sucked.

Caroline believed good intentions counteracted bad impact. (She’d literally met her boyfriend by scamming his brother, so it tracked that she thought that.)

But I had taken a bad situation and made it a thousand times worse.

The truth was, I was a self-absorbed mess and always had been. My ruthless self-belief was necessary to make it in my field and was why people wanted to follow me. I simply didn’t have time to sit on a friend’s couch and listen while she told me every annoying thing her boyfriend had done this month—but if she wanted to share it while I filmed a “Come with Me and My Friend to Get Brunch and Have Our Nails Done” video, then, sure, see you at eleven. I was always thinking about content first: friends were featured extras. As a result, I’d burned most of my friendships by always being the main character.

Then, when I needed a friend to talk me out of doing something awful on a livestream and ruining my life, no one was there. Not even Caroline, whom I loved like a sister. And actually, if I were honest with myself about that too, sometimes I loved Caroline like a parent. She was only three years older than me, but when we lived together, I’d leaned into my most dysfunctional personality traits because it forced her to care for me. To stay with me.

Caroline had mothered me, and I’d relished the maternal affection. I’d been pushing the limits of our friendship for years, sure that eventually she would get sick of being the live-in friend of an influencer. But she hadn’t. Unlike my mom, Caroline’s loyalty wasn’t something I had to perform to keep.

When she did eventually leave, it wasn’t because of anything I’d done. It was because she fell in love.

And it was awful that I resented her for it.

Even though she and Chase made me welcome at their place, I didn’t really know how to have a friendship that wasn’t 100 percent on my terms, at my convenience, whenever I needed. Caroline had stopped answering midnight texts; she stopped watching every video. I knew she was trying to establish healthy boundaries, but it hurt.

I wasn’t the kind of person who could successfully exist unsupervised. Some people could—not me. I was a bowling ball thrown down the lane by someone covering their eyes. I needed guardrails. Preferably live-in guardrails. Not live-in-Chelsea guardrails.