After Quitting the Industry, My Ex

Untitled Episode 16

After I left, all the promotion and public interaction we’d been doing for the new series stopped overnight.

A lot of people asked about it under Ethan’s social media posts.

In the end, he replied with only one sentence:

Was she really that important?

Everyone was shocked.

Someone took a screenshot and sent it to me in a private message.

I replied:

He’s nothing to me.

After that, I deleted every public social media account I had.

And from then on,

the story between Ethan and me became like dead branches and rotting leaves—

something completely decayed.

I turned the SD card over between my fingers.

It held the raw, unedited footage from episode two of the reality show.

Two minutes earlier, I’d uploaded the whole thing online.

The way I got it was dramatic enough to belong in its own episode.

The show’s director had come to find me and tried every possible angle to persuade me to keep filming.

I smiled. “So you get to manipulate the edit and I’m not allowed to leave?”

He wiped the sweat off his forehead. “It won’t happen again…”

I said, “Let’s talk at your studio.”

Once we got there, I kept my eyes open. On my way out, I casually picked up an SD card off a desk and slipped it into my pocket.

I hadn’t expected to get lucky.

But somehow, I did.

It was the raw footage for episode two.

Honestly, I’d assumed that once I posted it, the network’s PR people and bot accounts would jump in and bury it.

Instead, the story only got hotter.

The trending hashtags kept climbing with no sign of slowing down.

[What did Ethan Kane mean by that? What the hell was that line about Maya Moore not knowing whether he was “platonic”?]

[Holy s**t, so there really was something between them?!]

[This man has seriously lost it. He was the one hugging Maya in the hotel lobby and refusing to let her leave, and people were still defending him?]

[Wait—Nina Cole ran into HER on purpose???]

[I don’t even want to open my eyes. Please let this be a hallucination.]

[Nina, I trusted you. I fought for you all over the internet and this is how you repay people?]

[What a fake innocent act.]

[What is this, some giant celebrity love triangle? I’m done.]

[And Rowan too, stop kissing up to Nina already, okay? Your precious Nina has been obsessed with Maya this whole time, just trying to smear her.]

[Honestly, I think Maya just can’t be bothered with any of them.]

[Maya really got screwed over…]

[Can you people stop acting smart after the fact?]

[Fine, Maya Moore, I owe you an apology. I misjudged you before.]

I scanned past the comments calmly, without much of a reaction.

The day before I was due to leave the country, someone I never expected asked to meet me.

When I stepped into the private booth of the café, Nina Cole was already there.