Julia woke to a phone that buzzed like a hive. For a second she thought it was a dream—the way light on the ceiling blurred and the bed felt too small—then the screen filled with red: a thousand little explosions of anger, ridicule, and assumption. Her thumb shook as she opened the notifications. Comments stacked like stones: Gold digger, shameless, stay away from our sons. The words were sharp enough to hurt; the volume made them brutal.
She swallowed bile and forced her fingers to scroll. The articles had multiplied overnight, each one angling a different blade at the same soft place. A comment thread argued whether she had engineered the gala for social climbing; another posted a doctored photo that placed her at a party she'd never attended. Her breath came shallow, the air in the apa
