Chapter 24

24

How’s this for a turn for the books? Meredith’s disappearance going viral is good for everyone involved. Well, except for Meredith, of course. But that can’t be helped. For everyone else who is still alive, the news cycle brings wave after wave of amazing surprises.

Mere days after Meredith’s disappearance was announced, my account is very nearly at seven million followers on TikTok, and is already at over six million on Instagram. It’s a growth rate unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Like I said, America is obsessed with beautiful missing women. Liv’s account has boomed too. She’s now at over three hundred thousand followers. She and I are posting content at a furious pace: three to five videos a day, most of them related to Meredith. I share past videos and photos of myself with Meredith—easy to do since there are literally millions of them in my folder.

Liv is surprisingly helpful. She often serves as the “interviewer” in my videos, asking me specific questions about Mer ( What’s her favorite food? What’s her favorite outfit? ) and coming up with theories of how these little tidbits of information might help us find Mer ( Do you think maybe the police could keep a lookout for people ordering vegan pizzas, since that’s Mer’s favorite food? ). They’re absolutely useless, of course. The food thing, for example. What kidnapper in his right mind is going to be spoiling his victim with her favorite food? Still, the videos do ridiculous numbers, spreading like a California wildfire. The comments are full of people trying to be helpful, reporting that they saw a shady-looking guy buying vegan pizza in Brentwood, or that they caught a glimpse of someone wearing something similar to Mer’s favorite jumpsuit. All of it useless in terms of actually finding Mer, but extremely useful in bumping my follower count up.

The kids, too, are behaving beautifully. Well, Noemie has always been well-behaved. But Elea has done a complete one-eighty. She doesn’t talk back to me anymore. Her anger has been replaced with fear, which honestly sounds more horrible than it really is. Because when she was angry, I didn’t know how to deal with it. But her fear is easy to handle. I even cherish it, in a twisted way, because it’s what brings her back to my arms. At night, she cuddles up sweetly to me, baby-like, and asks me to read her bedtime stories once again. And when we walk to the park, Elea holds my hand tight. I hold my baby girl close to me and pray that when the fear does fade, I won’t lose her like I did before.

Even Clara is doing well. I went to her place and shot a video of her with Luca, and the outpouring of sympathy was so overwhelming that I set up a GoFundMe to help support them. It surpassed its goal of fifteen thousand dollars many times over, and is still ticking up every time I check on it.

And, in a way, even Meredith is doing well. Her TikTok now has over five million followers. Ironically, even her old videos are getting millions of new views every day. People are watching them on repeat, trying to look for clues in them—a glimpse of some guy watching Meredith intently in the background—or trying to find a pattern in her daily routine so they might guess whose attention she might have caught. As a result, her accounts are growing faster than mine. Her wish has come true, and I’m honestly crushed that she’s not able to see it happen.

Because the thing that really breaks me is that I was perfectly content trailing along behind Mer. My whole life, I’ve been more comfortable as the sidekick. I never wanted to best anybody. I didn’t have big dreams of becoming a huge star or anything. I just wanted to have enough followers to get by. I was happy when I blew up, of course I was, but all the success came with so much baggage. The more I earned, the more I spent on my family, and the more I needed to earn. I always thought that one day I could save up enough to cut back on posting, but somehow, I was unable to ever get there. There are so many bills, each one staggeringly huge. Meanwhile, Mer was secretly becoming embittered, the bond of our friendship growing more and more strained, until one day it snapped, and the tension sent us both reeling back.

I always wanted Mer to succeed. I wanted her to do better than me, I really did. If I had to be a star, then I wanted my soul twin to be an even bigger star, to take some of the limelight off me. I cried when I saw how fast Mer’s accounts were growing, and I hoped that if there was an afterlife, that she’d be gazing down and smiling at the number of followers she has now.

This morning, after making the usual school run, I go straight to a meeting that was set up ages ago. It’s one that I’m particularly excited about: a meeting with Damien Kim, the producer who’s doing a Netflix show about influencers. I’ve prepared myself well for this meeting. I need this to work out. I need this to save me from the never-ending demand of content creation—to give me some sort of stability so I can finally take a step back and go, “Okay, that’s enough.” Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves , I remind myself. One step at a time .

We’d agreed to meet at a trendy café—your typical LA fare, sun kissed and filled with plants everywhere, and serving things like organic matcha lattes with burnt rice milk. I get there five minutes early, settle Sabine in her high chair, and order myself a matcha latte. I hate to admit it, but the burnt rice milk is delicious. Sabine cheerfully stuffs Cheerios into her mouth. The server tells me Sabine is the cutest baby he’s ever seen, and I make a mental note to tip him generously. I take another sip of my matcha. By now, it’s half gone. I look at my phone. Damien is fifteen minutes late.

My rib cage closes up like a fist. Not again. I open up my Calendar and check the event. According to this, I’m at the right place, and at the right time. Since I killed Meredith, I went through all of my appointments and corrected them. Or so I thought. Because there were still mistakes made. Appointments I missed, like the one with Sunflower Cheeks. And I don’t understand it. I know I corrected them. It was one of the first things I did the day after coming back from the desert.

I close my calendar, find Damien’s number in my contacts, and call him. He picks up after three rings.

“Hi, Aspen. This is a surprise,” he says.

My mouth goes dry. A surprise? Why would it be a surprise if we were supposed to meet up today? Unless, of course, we weren’t. “Hi, Damien. Ah, were we supposed to meet today? Because I’m sitting here at For Goodness’ Sake…”

There’s a moment of surprised silence. Then he says, “Aspen, you canceled our meeting, remember?”

“What?” Did Mer do that?

“Yeah, you sent a text and said you’re no longer interested in the show.”

I swear every drop of blood drains from my head. I almost faint then. “N-no,” I manage to choke out. “I didn’t—that was definitely not from me. I’m still very much interested in your show.”

Damien groans. “Oh man, that really sucks. I would’ve loved to have you, but when you turned me down, I reached out to other influencers. The roster’s full now. I’m sorry, Aspen.”

I feel so heavy, like my bones have been replaced with lead. I want to collapse in a defeated heap and never get up again. “Is there a way to uh, slot me in?” I ask weakly.

“I’m afraid not at this point, but tell you what, if anyone drops out, you’ll be the first person I call. Okay?”

“Okay. Thank you, Damien.” After I hang up, I stare at the phone for a long time, my thoughts a confused blur. I know I didn’t send a text to Damien to cancel our meeting. But then who did? Who could’ve done it? I open up my text messages and do a search for my texts with Damien. But all of my messages to him have been erased, the thread wiped clean. I lose sensation in my hands. My phone thunks onto the table. Heads turn, eyes looking at me, but I don’t care.

Someone went into my phone and erased my messages. Could it have been Meredith? Was this something she did before I killed her? Unlikely. I can remember that the last message I sent to Damien was a week after Meredith died. Someone else did this.

My mind sifts through every possible suspect. Ben. Liv. Clara. My online trolls. Maybe they managed to hack into my phone. Is that possible? Of course it is. Anything can be done nowadays. What else has been tampered with? The back of my neck prickles, bursting into goose bumps. I peer over my shoulder, half expecting someone to be watching me. My phone feels sullied, like a hidden camera designed to spy on me. With a shudder, I turn it off. I can’t get out of the café fast enough. I take out a twenty-dollar bill and leave it at the table, then lift Sabine out of the high chair and practically run out of there.

Inside my car, I force myself to pause and catch my breath. I can’t drive in a panicked state. I won’t allow myself to do that. Deep breaths. In and out. Count backward from ten. I can deal with this. I dealt with Meredith, didn’t I? And look how well that’s going for everyone now. Whoever is sabotaging me, I’ll find out. I’ll work everything out.

Finally, I feel calm enough to drive home. I do so slowly, my mind still prying away at the locked box that is the mystery of my sabotaged calendar. I imagine Ben doing it, tapping away at my phone while I’m in the shower. The image swims to my mind easily, painfully vivid and clear. I swallow and force the image away. I move on to Liv. The times I had to change Sabine’s diaper while Liv was at my house. The times I had to leave the room for whatever reason. I think of Liv picking up my phone. Again, the image is incredibly easy to conjure up. I can see her doing it as easily as I see Ben. Then I think of Clara. I think of the time I went to her place to shoot videos with her. At one point, Luca woke up from his nap, and Clara asked if I could get him and maybe change his diaper while I was at it. I’d agreed without a second thought; after all, I was still carrying the guilt of killing Meredith and saddling Clara with Luca. Luca turned out to be a squirmy kid; it took me an interminably long time to get his diaper changed. Could Clara have gone into my phone then? Then I think of some anonymous troll sitting in some dank basement, typing away on their keyboard. Smiling when they finally break into my phone.

The problem is, I can see each one of these possibilities so clearly. Every single one of them is plausible. And where does that leave me? My breath is coming in and out rapidly again, and I have to remind myself to calm the hell down. Panicking isn’t going to solve anything. Okay, one step at a time. I’ll start by questioning Ben and Liv as casually as I can, since I see them every day. But carefully. Oh, so carefully. And before I even do that, I need to make sure that all of my appointments are in order. I’ll call up every single person I’m supposed to meet and confirm our meetings, then I’ll—ah, I’ll get a notebook and jot them down manually. Yes. That’ll work. And when I find out who’s behind this…

My hands tighten around the steering wheel, strangling it. I’ve killed once, and you know what? It wasn’t too bad, actually. I could do it again if I had to. I really could. How’s that for #authenticity?

Except when I get home, Ben rushes to meet me at the door, his eyes wild. “Where’ve you been?” he cries. “I’ve been calling you like crazy, and you didn’t—what happened to your phone?”

“I turned it off. Why?” I haven’t seen Ben this panicked in—well, ever. And it’s contagious. My neck grows warm. “What is it, Ben, what’s wrong? Is it the girls? Are they okay?”

“Yes, they’re fine.” Ben swallows. I watch his Adam’s apple bob and try to squash the hysteria that’s threatening to bubble up my throat. Ben licks his lips and holds out his hands, gesturing at me to hand Sabine to him. For a split second, I almost refuse, clutching her protectively. But then I tell myself I’m being silly, and I hand Sabine to him. “Come. I think you should sit down.”

“Ben, you’re scaring me. Just tell me, damn it. What is it?”

Ben drags his eyes to meet mine, and his expression is so haunted that it pushes me back physically. “I’m so sorry, Aspen. Meredith is dead. They found her body.”