Chapter 9
Daphne
I woke up late, which was my fault, and then immediately proved it by checking my phone. Bad idea.
It was a small, panicked avalanche the moment my thumb unlocked the screen.
Seven missed calls from Talia. Three from Mom.
A voicemail from my producer that started with, “Call me. Now.” and ended with a string of breathless expletives that I didn’t need to hear before coffee.
My screen was an illuminated bruise of red circles and numbers—notifications piling like unpaid bills.
#StormWalker
Instagram had also come alive like an angry animal.
My latest post was tagged in half a dozen fan edits—filters and neon hearts and the sort of cringe captioning that made my teeth ache.
Someone had made a side-by-side of me mid-sip and a medieval executioner.
My DMs were a minefield. A few were predictable: people cheering, people sighing, people sending GIFs.
One was worse: a Storm fan with a skull emoji and no text. Classy.
Then there were the texts. Nora had sent seven messages in a row that filtered into my head like a drill sergeant. All caps, all pain, all love.
WHAT DID YOU DO? ARE YOU SURE?
I’M CALLING.
EXPLAIN YOURSELF, HARLOT (VOICEMEMO ATTACHED)
I tapped the voice memo with dread and braced myself.
Nora’s voice filled my tiny living room—high, incredulous, theatrical.
“Okay, bestie, I need a full report. Was it intentional? Was it spicy on purpose? Did you plan the roast? Who told you you could touch the people’s hearts like that?
” She paused to breathe in a little cackle.
“Also, send receipts of the recoil. I need content.”
I laughed despite myself, a wet, gasping noise that tasted like regret and espresso.
My mouth was dry. My head ached like it had been used as a target in an emotional sport.
I rolled onto my stomach and flattened my face into the pillow.
The world smelled faintly of yesterday’s coffee and the leftover sugar on my desk, and everything in me wanted to disappear under the duvet for a week.
Instead, I surfaced and scrolled.
There were the expected invectives—men arguing about my “qualifications” and whether my shoes were sensible enough for journalism.
There were the surprisingly fierce defenses: parents thanking me for calling out someone who had ghosted a charity afternoon, a mother of a kid who’d waited for autographs saying she’d been waiting for someone to speak up.
There were also the inevitable trolls promising boycotts and petition forms and the sort of coordinated outrage that felt machine-made.
My producer’s email was flagged with a subject line: MEDIA STRATEGY — TODAY.
I clicked it. Cameron wanted a plan, fast. He’d included a tentative schedule: soft rollout ideas, staging locations, a crisis statement that read like it had been written by someone trying to be both a priest and a brand consultant.
Like we hadn't already gone through it five times.
I scrolled until my thumb went numb, then put the phone face down on the duvet and let the silence be loud.
I should have been panicked. I should have been plotting damage control, prepping statements, calling lawyers, or at least agreeing to a dozen awkward on-camera apologies.
Instead, a small, feral part of me felt pleased—dangerous and ridiculous and embarrassingly vindicated.
He had missed a charity event. Kids had been let down.
That was the raw, ugly truth, and the internet was messy and often wrong but sometimes it did the job I’d been hired to do: hold people accountable.
“Cameron,” I whispered into the pillow. “You absolute idiot.”
Because the truth rising in my chest was a simple, spiteful bloom that made me both proud and ashamed: if this was the fallout, so be it. If saying the thing meant the kettle had to whistle, then let it.
I peeled my face off the pillow, grabbed my laptop, and—voicemail and tweets forgotten for a second—typed a blunt note to Talia: Make sure they give you everything they promised.
Hit every legal box. Don’t let them gaslight the charity angle.
I hit send with the kind of decisive flick that meant I wasn’t going to be steamrolled.
Then, curling back under the duvet, I muttered into the room and the half-open window and the city that had already picked apart my morning show, “I’m going to kill Cameron.”
I didn’t even get through my first sip of coffee before Nora called. The screen lit up with her contact photo—an aggressively filtered selfie we took at graduation—and I braced myself as I answered.
She didn’t waste time with hello.
“YOU HELD HIS HAND.”
I groaned, sinking into the kitchen stool like it might swallow me whole. “Nora—”
“You held his hand,” she repeated, as if I hadn’t heard her the first time. “You made eye contact like you were in a romcom. What the hell, Sommers?”
“It was for the cameras,” I said, already wincing at how defensive I sounded.
Nora was not buying it. “Girl, your boyfriend looked like he was about to propose. There was a pause. You lingered. The air between you had music.”
“There was no music.”
“There is now.”
She put me on speaker and I heard furious tapping—probably her scrolling through her for-you-page like it was the morning paper.
“Wait. Wait—OMG. There’s a slowed-down video of him smiling at you. Someone put Lana Del Rey behind it. You’re officially the Internet’s reluctant soft-girl.”
My forehead met the kitchen counter. “I hate everyone.”
Nora cackled. “You can’t even deny it properly. The camera pans, he glances over like you hung the stars, and then boom—we get Sad Boi Kieren giving heart eyes while Young and Beautiful plays in the background.”
“It was a burrito-induced smile.”
Nora didn’t miss a beat. “Sure. Because he looks at everyone like that. Total burrito simp energy.”
“I mean, it was a really good burrito,” I muttered, not even convincing myself.
She kept scrolling. “Oh, there’re memes. One says, ‘Me pretending I don’t love my girlfriend.’ Another says, ‘Enemies to Lovers: Episode One.’”
I let out a long, suffering sigh. “Remind me why I agreed to this?”
"Agreed to what?"
I bit my lip. "I'll tell you, but you can't tell anyone."
"Faking it for the cameras?" she asked.
"How did you—"
“Because you’re a people pleaser with unresolved daddy issues.”
“Too early, Nora.”
She laughed again, but it was softer this time. “Honestly? You didn’t look miserable. I’ve seen you on real dates look more like you wanted to light yourself on fire.”
“I didn’t hate it,” I admitted, tracing a chip in the ceramic mug. “Which is the problem.”
“You mean the part where your fake soccer boyfriend is a six-foot-six storm cloud with secrets and tragic eyebrows?”
“Yes. That part.”
There was a pause. I could practically hear Nora’s smirk through the phone. “Do you… like him?”
“No,” I said too quickly. “I mean. No. Of course not.” A beat. "He's Kieren freaking Walker."
“Wow. You are such a bad liar.”
“I don’t like him,” I insisted. “He’s rude. And broody. And emotionally unavailable.”
Nora snorted. “You’re literally describing every fictional man you’ve ever swooned over. He’s a checklist.”
“I need new checklists.”
“No, you need to accept that the Lana Del Rey edit is now canon, and your fake relationship is trending in five countries.”
I blinked. “Wait—what?”
“Oh yeah,” Nora said, satisfied. “Hashtag StormWalker has international legs. Buckle up, bestie. The shippers are feral.”
"I'm going now."
"Kiss him for me!"
I hung up without a response.
I should have known better than to open Twitter before my second cup of coffee, but habit and curiosity are terrible bedfellows. I tapped the app and immediately felt the familiar churn—the public moving like a tide and I, irritatingly, was the rock in it.
The top feed was a carousel of edited clips from yesterday’s lunch, slowed-down loops, reaction videos, and more speculative essays than I’d expect at a daytime book club. My mentions were a circus: supportive threads, death threats, think pieces, and a baffling number of wedding-ring GIFs.
Someone had already stitched a montage of his hand brushing mine next to a clip of me coughing from spicy salsa and titled it “Protective Boyfriend Era.” I felt my face heat up despite the late-morning light cutting through my blinds.
I scrolled until my thumb hurt and then saw three comments that should’ve landed in a trash folder but didn’t.
“Kieren Walker is the standard. Do you see the way he looks at her??”
“I will accept no less than soccer-protective-boyfriend energy in my life.”
“Daphne Sommers is a journalism icon and a goddess and if she breaks his heart I will riot.”
I read them again, slower this time, because the sheer audacity was almost impressive.
Fans loved a narrative. They loved a villain turned soft, a grump softened by warmth, a mean girl reformed by love.
They loved chaos reframed as destiny. Social media manufactured mythology with the efficiency of a conveyor belt: take footage, add a heartbreak soundtrack, sell tickets to the funeral.
I wanted to be furious. Part of me was—because someone somewhere would monetize my words and edit my sarcasm into cruelty and call it “authenticity.” Part of me was tired—sick of being the headline and the body copy and the reaction gif for strangers with no stake in the actual story.
And part of me, spiteful and ridiculous, was a little pleased.
Dangerous to admit, even in the privacy of my apartment, but there it was: someone had noticed.
Someone had said out loud what I’d been trying to make small, the thing I didn’t admit to myself when I was sober enough to ignore it.