Chapter 8 - The Viral Explosion|
By midnight, my tiny apartment felt like a sanctuary.
I had tucked Lily into her bed, kissing her forehead three times. She had fallen asleep almost instantly, exhausted from the sheer emotional toll of the evening.
I sat at my small kitchen table with a hot cup of tea, staring out the window at the quiet street below. My phone was sitting on the laminate table. It hadn't stopped buzzing for two hours.
I finally picked it up.
There were twenty-seven missed calls from my mother. Fourteen text messages from Vanessa, ranging from furious threats of lawsuits to pathetic, hysterical pleas for me to “delete the drive.”
Then I opened social media.
My stomach did a slow flip.
A guest at the wedding—likely one of Newport’s elite socialites—had live-streamed Lily’s speech on TikTok.
The video was already sitting at four point two million views.
The internet was having a field day. The caption read: “8-year-old exposes corrupt bride at $200k Newport wedding!” The comment section was a war zone of thousands of people praising Lily’s bravery, calling Vanessa a villain, and demanding to know if the bride had been arrested yet.
A new notification flashed across the top of my screen. It was a text message from an unknown number.
“Claire, this is Mark. We need to talk. You need to pull that video down before the police come to my house. Vanessa told me the DA is involved. I have a kid to think about!”
I stared at the message from my ex-husband. The man who had abandoned his own sick child to save his own skin.
I slowly typed back three words:
“Call a lawyer.”
Then I blocked his number.
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I set the phone down, took a sip of my tea, and looked at the clock. It was one in the morning.
In eight hours, I was going to meet Graham Ellison. And for the first time in my life, I wasn't going to hide in the shadows.
