Chapter 25
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
MIRANDA
The power of the acceleration pushes me back into the driver’s seat when I hit the gas.
While I have little experience handling smaller vehicles with less horsepower, I’m cognizant of the force of this one.
I love being behind the wheel of this truck, sitting so high above everyone else on the road.
I feel invincible, and it’s pretty awesome.
Anna’s decision to settle down has brought all these new adventures into my life, and I’m loving the ride, pun intended.
It’s much easier to explore one’s surroundings with access to a vehicle.
Uber drivers require a destination. When I left the house this morning, I didn’t have one.
I visited a quaint little coffee shop with an entire wall of books to read.
I read several chapters of Little Women, one of my favorite books when I was younger, while I sipped my vanilla chai latte.
Following the coffee shop, I noticed a sign for a farmers’ market. It was set up in a community center, away from the rainy April weather. I had entirely too much fun exploring every booth and spending way too much money.
A loud, blaring honk jolts me out of my skin. I yelp and actually lift off the truck seat an inch. Damn roundabouts. I throw up a frantic wave toward the guy I just unintentionally cut off.
“Sorry!” I call even though he absolutely cannot hear me.
Well… driving for the most part is going well. I mean, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
The important thing—the thing I cling to—is that I passed. I passed my driving test. Both the written exam and the actual driving portion. I possess a real, legitimate, state-issued Michigan driver’s license with my name and terrible photo, and all. I’m official.
I make it home without any additional incidents and unload the truck.
Earlier this week, I saw a TikTok recipe for a soup called Three Amigas…
or Three Friends… something along those lines.
Apparently, it originates from somewhere in South America and is supposed to be super healthy because it uses the “three essentials of life,” according to the creator—corn, squash, and black beans.
So naturally, when I went to the farmers’ market, I bought corn, squash, and black beans.
Now I just need to find the recipe again.
I haul the bags into the kitchen and set them on the counter, already imagining myself as someone who casually whips up cultural, nutrient-dense meals instead of burning sliders into charcoal bricks.
Miles comes home today, and I can’t wait.
He’s only been gone two days, but I miss him like crazy.
I travel with him most of the time, but Anna and I had meetings this week, so we stayed behind.
Logically, it’s probably healthy for us to have a little time apart.
We live together. We spend nearly every waking moment together.
And we’re still so new, so some time apart should be good.
But logic means nothing to my heart because life is just better when Miles is here. Everything is better.
So yes, I’m going to make my man some healthy soup to replenish his muscles after a hard couple of games.
Once everything is unpacked and put away, I sink onto the sofa with my phone, legs curled beneath me. I start scrolling through my saved videos and social media feeds, hunting for that recipe. I type in corn, black bean, squash soup, Latin America, and a handful of clips pop up.
“Oh,” I say aloud. “Three Sisters. It’s called Three Sisters Soup. Well… I was close.”
I tap video after video, watching cheerful creators chop squash and gush about ancestral ingredients. It’s exactly what I need.
But when I click out of one and back to my search page—
I freeze.
My thumb stops midair. My lungs forget how to work.
Because staring back at me from my screen… is me.
My face—my fifteen-year-old face from twelve years ago—right next to him.
A cold slice of terror cuts straight through me. Tears sting instantly, hot and traitorous, and I swipe them away so fast my skin burns.
With shaking fingers, I click the hashtag with my name.
My throat closes.
Video after video after video floods the screen—strangers, self-proclaimed crime reporters, gossip-chasing influencers, true-crime vultures—all of them dissecting my life, my story, my trauma like it’s entertainment.
My name. My face. My past. All dragged out into the light I have spent twelve years avoiding.
And I know—God, I know—this didn’t just suddenly surface on some algorithmic fluke.
This has Tracey written all over it.
Her poison fingerprints are everywhere.
The harassment back then had been almost unbearable.
If it hadn’t been for Anna—if she hadn’t stepped in, shielded me, given me a place to disappear—I honestly don’t know if I would have survived it.
But even then, social media was different.
It was softer in its reach. It wasn’t the unstoppable monster it is today.
This—what’s happening now—is something else entirely. A monster with teeth.
Every video, every thread, every stitched clip is worse than the last. Each influencer is trying to outdo the others—more dramatic, more sensational, more unhinged speculation—because the more shocking the story, the more clicks they get. And clicks mean money.
They call it “justice.”
They call it “raising awareness.”
They call it “telling the truth.”
But they don’t care about me. Not even a little.
I’m not a person to them. I’m a spectacle. A headline. A chance to go viral.
And as I scroll—my face plastered next to his, my trauma weaponized for their engagement—my chest constricts so tightly it feels like my lungs are going to stop working altogether.
I won’t ever escape this.
It’s happening all over again, but amplified—louder, faster, crueler. And worse…I’ve dragged the two people I love most into the blast radius.
Anna—my best friend, my anchor—fresh off winning an Academy Award, will now be tethered to this nightmare simply because she loves me. Because she employs me. Because I stand next to her.
My boyfriend—my sweet Miles—one of the stars of the Stanley Cup-winning hockey team, the kind of man the entire city adores, won’t be able to outrun it either. They’ll twist it. They’ll spin it. They’ll make him guilty by association. They always find a way.
No one connected to me is safe from this.
It’s going to be everywhere. Every timeline. Every feed. Every comment section.
And when it hits full speed—when the story spreads and mutates and grows claws—I will lose everything.
Everything I’ve built.
Everything I’ve found.
Everything I finally let myself hope for.
Because no matter how hard I run, my past always finds a way to catch me.
Sobs wrack my body—deep, shuddering, uncontrollable—while I stare at my phone, unable to stop watching video after grotesque video. My thumb keeps scrolling even as my vision blurs, as if some part of me believes the next clip will magically make this all make sense.
It doesn’t.
It only gets worse.
I keep trying—desperately—to come up with a way to fix this.
Some plan, some loophole, some miracle statement to make it all disappear.
But I don't see one. I genuinely don’t know what to do.
It doesn’t matter if I disappear again, go into hiding, cut ties with Miles and Anna, and go back to being a ghost. It won’t undo the damage.
They’re already affected. The story has already spread. The comments are already pouring in.
The genie is out of the bottle, and there's no shoving it back inside.
What kind of person does this? What kind of person digs up a trauma from over a decade ago and blasts it across the internet for entertainment? Who looks at a teenage girl’s worst moment and thinks, Yes, let me turn that into content?
I wanted to believe time had done its job—that enough years had passed for the world to forget, for me to heal. I wanted to believe that one stupid lapse in judgment and trusting the wrong person wouldn’t haunt me forever.
I wanted to believe that someone like Miles could love me and that I could have a future—an actual future—with him. A safe one. A joyful one. The kind of elusive happily ever after I’d stopped letting myself fantasize about years ago.
But now?
Now I don’t even know if love was ever an option for me.
I wasn’t honest with him. I didn’t warn him this could happen. I didn’t tell him the worst of my past—the parts I still cry over—the parts that made me vow I would never let anyone close enough to be collateral damage.
Now it is happening, and it’s going to destroy us.
That is all my fault.
Letting down my barriers, letting him touch my heart, letting myself fall—those are my faults too.
I’m not blameless in this, and for that, I will never forgive myself.