15. Fiona
Fiona
The familiar terrain grounded her. Every echo of a locker slamming shut or a student's sneaker squeaking across the tile reminded her: This is where I matter.
She had almost reached her classroom door when she remembered posting last night, and she almost missed a step.
She paused outside the door and glanced down at her phone. Her finger hovered over the icon. Then, heart kicking against her ribs, she tapped it.
Part of her was sure she’d open the app and find nothing. Or worse—mockery. She wasn’t sure which would hurt more: silence or scorn.
The feed blinked open.
@missfionasays
1 post. 8 followers.
She recognized most of the names—Emma, her cousin, a couple coworkers from the school. Probably people who’d followed back without really looking. She scrolled down to the post.
There was one comment from a username she didn’t recognize. It said simply:
“Needed this today. Thank you.”
Fiona’s breath caught in her throat.
It had mattered. To one person. On one day.
That was enough.
She tucked the phone into her pocket and pushed open the classroom door.
The phone buzzed against the desk during silent reading time.
Fiona glanced down and saw it: "Dean " lighting up the screen. The red heart a neon sign advertising her own stupidity.
She flipped it face-down without reading the message.
Around her, twenty-three fifth-graders were bent over their books—some actually reading, others staring at pages and daydreaming. The room was filled with the soft rustle of turning pages and the occasional whispered question. Normal sounds. Safe sounds.
The phone buzzed again. And again.
Fiona kept her eyes on her own book. She'd read it already, but she wasn't really absorbing the words anyway. She was just grateful for something to look at that wasn't her phone.
When the period ended and her students shuffled out for lunch, Fiona finally turned the phone over.
Three messages:
Fi, can we talk?
I know you're upset but we need to work this out
You can't just disappear
The audacity of it made her breathless.
He'd shared her private thoughts publicly. And now he was upset that she was choosing her own invisibility?
The phone buzzed in her hands. Another text.
I love you. We can fix this.
Fiona's thumb hovered over the keyboard. Part of her ached to respond. Wanted to type back I love you too and let him fix everything in her that hurt.
Maybe she was overreacting. Maybe this wasn't that bad. Maybe love meant forgiving the unforgivable.
She deleted the messages.
Then she went into his contact and changed his name from "Dean " to just "Dean."
It was a small thing. Petty, maybe. But seeing his name without the heart felt like taking back something that belonged to her.
Her phone buzzed with a call this time. Dean's name—plain, unadorned Dean—filled the screen.
She declined it.
It rang again immediately.
She declined again.
On the third call, she turned the phone completely off.
The silence felt strange. For years, she'd been available to him constantly—texting throughout the day, calling during her lunch break, sending him photos of funny things her students said or interesting clouds she'd spotted on her drive home.
She'd thought that closeness was love. That constant connection meant they were building something together.
Now she realized he hadn’t liked her texts at all. He’d thought they were beneath him. He’d thought she was beneath him.
Fiona slipped the phone into her desk drawer and locked it.
She had twenty minutes left of lunch break. She could eat her sandwich in peace, grade a few papers, maybe even think her own thoughts without wondering if they'd end up as captions online.
Fiona stood at the front of her classroom, marker in hand, staring at the whiteboard where she'd written "Creative Writing: Personal Narratives."
Her students were bent over their notebooks, pencils scratching across paper, completely absorbed in their assignment.
But the only personal narrative she could think about was @shitfionasays.
She couldn’t keep avoiding it. The pictures. The comments. The full scope of what Dean had done to her. Every time she thought about looking, her stomach clenched and she found something else to focus on. Lesson plans. Grading. Anything.
But standing here, watching her students pour their honest thoughts onto paper without fear of judgment, she felt something shift in her chest.
What if it wasn't as bad as she'd imagined? What if she was overreacting, just like Dean had said? What if she'd built this up in her mind into something worse than it actually was?
The hope felt dangerous and foolish, but it was there. Whispering that maybe—maybe—she was being dramatic. That maybe the posts were actually fond, the comments mostly harmless. That maybe her hurt had colored everything, made her see malice where there was just... playfulness between friends.
She felt foolish all over again. Foolish for potentially overreacting. Foolish for running away without getting the full picture. Foolish for standing here in front of her class, too scared to even look at what he’d written about her.
But beneath the foolishness was something else: a terrible, desperate hope that maybe her marriage wasn't as broken as it felt. That maybe the man she loved hadn't actually betrayed her as completely as she feared.
She had to know.
"Miss Fiona?" Marcus looked up from his notebook. "How long should our stories be?"
"However long they need to be to tell the truth," she said automatically, her teacher voice steady even as her heart hammered.
After school, she decided. She didn’t have to look now. When she was by herself, then she'd look.
She had to know.
Fiona sat in her car in the grocery store parking lot, engine off, keys still dangling from the ignition. She’d needed somewhere anonymous, somewhere between school and Emma’s house, somewhere no one would recognize her if this went badly.
She stared down at her phone.
That terrible, foolish hope was still there—whispering that maybe she'd been wrong, maybe it wasn't as bad as she'd imagined. Maybe Dean was right that she was overreacting.
She had to know. All of it."
She typed @shitfionasays into the search bar.
The account appeared immediately. Dean's careful aesthetic—clean, minimal, each post formatted like a little magazine excerpt. Professional. Polished. Profitable.
22.3k followers.
Fiona's breath caught. Twenty thousand people. Following her humiliation. Consuming her private moments like entertainment.
She scrolled to the first post. Posted years ago.
Sweet girl, wrong planet. #naive #adorable
The first few posts looked almost… sweet.
Not kind, exactly. But fond? She could almost believe it, if she squinted. If she wanted to.
But the more she read, the more the contempt bled through the posts. She felt shame curl inside her chest like smoke. Her face felt itchy with a blush that had nowhere to hide.
Fiona: “I write notes to my future students every year in August. I want them to feel welcome before I even know them.”
My wife is already emotionally attached to children she hasn’t met.
And underneath that, comments from his friends, colleagues, total strangers.
is she for real though
your patience is inspiring king
this cannot be a real person
His posts got worse as she read. Or maybe she just started seeing them differently. What had looked like affection now felt like a zoo exhibit.
she sounds exhausting ngl
how does she function as an adult
A post from six months ago made her blood turn to ice.
A picture of a lunch she had packed him, neatly packed with a sticky note on top that said “You are not behind. You are exactly where you’re supposed to be.”
The caption read: Found this in my bag this morning. She packed me a sandwich and a pep talk. Like I’m seven.
She remembered writing that note. That morning, he'd looked tired. She’d wanted to lift him up.
And now it was content. Now it was… this.
The comments beneath made her stomach clench:
at least she's hot right??
someone needs to tell her Santa isn't real
she sounds like she has the IQ of a golden retriever but hey if you're into that
Dean had liked that comment. Dean had fucking liked it.
The humiliation was physical—a hot, crawling thing that started in her stomach and spread outward until her entire body felt like it was burning. Twenty-two thousand strangers had seen her be called stupid. Had agreed with it. Had laughed at her earnest attempts to love someone.
She thought about every dinner party, every work event, every time she'd smiled and tried to fit in while people who'd read these comments looked at her with barely concealed amusement.
They'd all known. They'd all been in on the joke.
And she'd stood there, desperate to belong, while they watched her perform exactly the kind of naive sweetness they'd come to expect from Dean's silly, little wife.
The comments grew more vicious with each post:
no one is actually this dumb
does she know how to read?
maybe don't let her vote
She kept scrolling, deeper into the archive of her own degradation. Post after post of her most vulnerable moments.
All of it here. All of it for sale.
She sat in the parking lot, staring through the windshield at nothing. This wasn't affectionate teasing. This was cruelty.
And Dean had not only allowed it—he'd cultivated it. Encouraged it. Profited from it.
She thought about all those nights when he'd held her, whispered that he loved her, kissed her forehead like she was precious.
He'd read every comment. He'd laughed at them.
The worst part—the part that made her want to claw her way out of her own skin—was that some of them were right.
She was naive. She did cry too easily. She didn’t speak their language, didn’t get their sleek, ironic jokes. She’d believed those things made her lovable. Unique. Worth holding onto.
But Dean had seen them as flaws. As fodder.
Her chest cinched, tight and sudden, like someone had wrapped a belt around her lungs and yanked. Her breath came shallow, too fast. The air in the car thickened, pressing against her skin like steam.
He’d kissed her goodnight while people laughed at her online. He’d said “I love you” while hitting the like button on a comment calling her dumb.
Her hands began to shake. Or had they been shaking this whole time?
The phone slipped from her fingers onto the seat beside her. Her heart pounded against her ribs, each beat louder than the last, drumming in her ears until it drowned everything else out.
She needed out. She needed air. She needed?—
She fumbled for the door handle, fingers stiff and clumsy. When the door finally swung open, she stumbled into the fresh air—blinking, gasping.
The parking lot reeled around her, too bright, too sharp, like someone had turned up the contrast on reality. Her knees buckled slightly. Sound bent weird around her, muffled and warped.
She couldn’t think past the white-noise roar in her head.
He’d made a joke out of her. And twenty thousand people had laughed.
She bent over, hands on her knees, and tried to breath.
She thought about calling Emma. About driving back to Sweetwater.
She needed to run. To erase this version of her life, the one that had turned out to be a lie. She wanted to disappear—start over somewhere quiet, somewhere no one had ever heard of Dean or his smug, polished posts.
But you couldn’t run from your life. Not like that. Not really. Not without logistics and planning and leases and... paperwork. Even heartbreak came with admin.
First she needed to get her things. All of them. Tonight.
She was done being married to a man who could watch strangers call her worthless and hit the like button.
The marriage wasn't just over.
It was dead. Had been dead for months, years, apparently, while she'd been busy loving someone who thought she was pathetic.
Maybe she had been. But that was going to change.