Chapter 8
Two weeks ago, that voice had gotten under my skin so badly I could barely think around it. Now all I heard was technique. Timing. Scented poison.
“You’re right about one thing,” I said. “I couldn’t handle the truth.”
I took my eyes off her and looked at the phone instead, at the rushing blur of people who had spent days tearing me open for entertainment.
“So I went looking for it.”
The room went still.
Even Mia went still.
I lifted my phone and mirrored it to the TV on the wall.
The first video was from outside the restaurant where Aaron had taken me after I found them together on the street.
In Mia’s post, the photo had looked intimate. Triumphant. Me smiling over a dinner she claimed was supposed to be hers. Aaron distant, turned slightly away, like he was emotionally already gone.
In the security clip, the reality was uglier and smaller.
Aaron and I were at the table.
Mia was three tables behind a partition, crouched beside a fake plant with another woman holding a phone through the leaves.
She had not stumbled on us.
She had followed us there.
“Creepy,” someone in the stream wrote.
“Obsessed.”
I played the next clip.
Street camera footage. The day I saw her holding Aaron’s hand.
From my angle, it had looked undeniable.
From above, the truth snapped into place so hard it made me dizzy all over again.
Aaron had stopped on the corner. Mia had approached him. He had stepped back. She had grabbed his wrist with both hands, leaned in, laughed at something I couldn’t hear, then slid one hand down into his like they were lovers just long enough for a photographer across the street to get the shot.
Right after that, she’d dropped him and run the second she saw me.
The comments changed direction in real time.
“Oh my god.”
“She staged it.”
“She literally pounced.”
Mia’s face was hard now. “So what? He still met me.”
I looked at her.
“Yes,” I said. “He did.”
That was the part no one in the room wanted from me. Not her. Not the audience. Not even me, if I was honest.
They wanted a heroine or a fool.
Not a woman standing in the mess admitting that two different ugly things could be true at once.
I clicked open the chat logs.
“Here,” I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. “This part’s real.”
Aaron had replied.
At first awkwardly, exactly like in her screenshot. Then faster once gaming came up. Jokes. Opinions. Late-night replies. He had told her his favorite co-op shooter, complained about club headaches, sent her a voice note laughing once at something I had never heard.
He had also told her where my client meeting was.
The day I “randomly” spotted them on that far street.
He had told her I worked too much lately.
That I never wanted to play anymore because I was bad at it.
That he felt like he had to be the calm one all the time.
Every sentence punched a different bruise.
Not because he had feelings for her.
That would have been cleaner.
Worse, in a way, was that he had used her like a glowing confession booth. A place to feel admired without consequences. A place to complain about me to a stranger who called herself helpful and called me blind.