Chapter Twenty-Eight
Twenty-eight
“What are you doing here?” Leila Donnelly said to Melanie Joan. “How did you find my home? Are you stalking me?”
Melanie Joan opened her mouth, then closed it again. In all the years I’d known her, this was the first time I’d ever seen her at a loss for words.
I found that completely understandable.
“Listen, this isn’t a great time.” Leila Donnelly said it dismissively, like we were a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses and she had no interest in the Good News.
I thought about what Evan Woodrow had said, about Book Babe being one of Leila Donnelly’s first champions, how she’d turned Donnelly into an “instant bestseller” with one five-star review. Like it or not, he’d said, that’s power.
It was something, all right.
“Sock puppet,” Melanie Joan said.
I had no idea what that meant.
Leila didn’t seem to know, either. “I said what I said, Melanie Joan. If you want to apologize to somebody, then apologize to Book Babe.”
Melanie Joan let out a mirthless laugh.
“I don’t have time for this,” Leila said. She started to close the door.
“Oh, I think you do.” I glared at her. “Book Babe.”
Leila’s eyes widened. She cleared her throat.
Her cheeks flushed and her gaze dropped to the floor, a tiny vein popping out just between her eyes.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
And even though I’d always considered the reading of tells and body-language cues to be an even more unreliable science than polygraph testing, I knew a liar when I saw one.
Swinging Dick’s intel was correct. Leila Donnelly was Book Babe. I’d have staked my life on it.
“She’s talking about you,” Melanie Joan said. “How you made up an online persona and gained followers so you could hype your own books and trash your competition.”
I turned to Melanie Joan. “Is that what a sock puppet is?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Wow, you learn something new every day,” I said.
“Well, you taught me about dis tracks, so now we’re even.”
Leila said, “I don’t know where you get your information, but—”
“We tracked Book Babe’s IP address, and it led us here,” I said. “Unless maybe it’s a housemate? You live alone?”
“None of your business.”
“I’m taking that as a yes.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Your fans might not agree,” I said. “I mean, from what I gather, they started reading you in the first place because Book Babe said you were awesome. And if Book Babe is you, well…”
Somewhere within her house, a young child started to scream.
“Don’t forget how she put a target on my back by posting a video in support of her own sock puppet,” Melanie Joan said.
“Yeah, I don’t think the readers will like that, either.”
The screams grew louder. Leila whirled around. “Tommy, be quiet!”
The screaming stopped.
“Terrible threes, am I right?” I glanced at her feet. “I see you got over those swollen ankles you wrote about.”
Leila’s shoulders straightened. Her gaze moved from my face to Melanie Joan’s. Slowly, her expression changed, her eyes hardening, her chin inching forward. A plan formulating in her mind. “Go for it,” Leila said.
Melanie Joan gaped at her. “What?”
“Go ahead and out me.” She turned to me. “If you think Leila Donnelly fans are going to take the word of that washed-up, fossilized hack over me—especially after that fiasco of a TV interview,” she said, “you’re even dumber than you look.”
Melanie Joan’s cheeks flushed. Quickly, she put her sunglasses back on.
“The truth hurts, I know,” Leila said.
“You’re hardly an authority on the truth,” I said.
“Fuck you, Leila,” Melanie Joan said. Her voice cracked. “If anyone’s a hack, it’s you.”
Leila ignored her. She kept talking to me.
“Old, bitter, desperate. All her best days behind her. Nobody wants to read her romances anymore, so she decides to write the least relatable memoir ever—and naturally, no one wants to read that, either! You almost can’t blame her for making up such a crazy story about me. I mean…anything to be relevant again.”
Melanie Joan seemed frail and unsteady on her feet, as though all the energy had been yanked out of her. Without saying a word, she turned around and headed back to the car.
I stayed where I was. I wasn’t sure I’d ever hated another person as much as I hated Leila Donnelly. And considering some of the people I’d come in contact with, that was saying a lot.
“They’ll believe me,” I said. Leila started to close the door, but I blocked it with my foot. “When you get a chance, google me. Sunny Randall. You’ll see that I’m pretty trustworthy.”
“I’ve never heard of you.”
“I never heard of you, either, until today,” I said. “And now you’re just…everywhere. Like a really shitty song that I can’t get out of my head.”
“That’s adorable.”
“It’s accurate,” I said. “Anyway, I can’t wait to contact my friends in the press. Let ’em tell the world about the real you, so to speak.”
“I don’t…I don’t talk to the press.”
“I do. And like I said, I’m trustworthy.”
“Don’t you fucking dare.”
I smiled sweetly at her. “Is that a threat or a challenge?” I said. “Because I react the same to both.”
Leila stared at me, her face growing paler.
“You’re right about one thing,” I said. “The truth does hurt. You’ll see.”
The child started screaming again.
“Shut the hell up!”
The scream grew louder, then erupted into sobs.
“You really ought to check on Tommy,” I said. “He doesn’t sound happy.”