I couldn't let it go.
The pregnancy fabrication had been debunked publicly but the question underneath it hadn't – who built it, why now, and what was coming next. Zara had closed her laptop that day in Rhys's apartment like the case was finished but I kept the file open in my head. Running it in the background while I went to class and wrote my column and pretended the ground beneath my feet wasn't riddled with cracks.
I started mapping it. Not on paper – in my head, where it couldn't be found or dismissed or called paranoid. A mental timeline that I updated every night before sleep like a prayer I didn't believe in but couldn't stop reciting.
The magazine publication – forty-eight hours later, the anonymous gossip post. My public admission at the mixer – within two days, Jade's confro
