Page 123 of Single Mom's Guide to Love

That’s…that’s absurd.

Right?

I mean, who would go and put together a family just to get on a likely-to-get-canceled-after-one-season reality show?

Stella: I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying that I’d bet my new boots and my Chanel bag that this woman has had at least an audition. And that the timing is suspicious.

“Who are you texting, Mommy?”

I look up from my phone to see Jayce and Logan coming back into the living room, snacks and drinks in hand. And yes, I didn’t ask, but my husband knew to bring me a Diet Coke.

“Your aunts,” I say. I want to see if he wants to FaceTime them, but the second everyone gets settled, we hear an alert that the gate is opening.

“Who’s bothering us at this hour?” Logan says as he checks the cameras. “What on earth is Kat doing back here?”

Logan heads to the door to greet her, but I’m sitting up straight in my seat. Kat has been enjoying life these days now that we’re married—and it’s not just for show—and that Logan is full steam ahead on his new idea. She even told me she might take a vacation this year.

So her coming back to the house, and driving like she’s running from the cops, at seven in the evening is something to be concerned about.

A few minutes later, Kat and Logan walk into the room, both looking pale and frantic.

“Jayce, buddy, how about you go to your room and start getting ready for bed.”

“I get it,” Jayce says with a sigh as he picks up his bowl of crackers. “Adult time.”

My son made a really good joke, and I can’t even enjoy it because Kat and Logan look like they’re about to drop a bomb on me.

“What is it?” I ask once I knew Jayce was out of earshot.

“Now, I want to start this off with saying that I just don’t work for Logan, but I work for you too. So however we decide to handle this, I have your back one-hundred percent.”

I feel my stomach starting to drop. “What is it?”

Kat pulls up her phone and shows me a picture that looks like it was taken on a digital camera in the 2000s.

And in the midst of that group of girls is me.

Topless.

“What the hell?” I say, zooming into make sure that it is me. Which I know it is. It’s from Spring Break 2008. I was twenty. In college. And was living my best life in Cancun, where I didn’t need an ID to drink. Or to enter a wet T-shirt contest where none of the shirts ended up staying on after they were soaked.

“It’s not just that.”

What? I have to blink a few times as Kat takes the phone from me and starts scrolling through more photos. It’s a whole gallery of compromising pictures from that Cancun spring break, to other college escapades, and from my party girl years in Nashville before Maeve Banks made a name for herself in the design field. But what makes me gasp is the final picture, which is of Logan and I the first night we met at the hotel bar.

Our first kiss.

But it doesn’t look like just a kiss. Somehow the picture has been manipulated to look like he’s groping me on the dance floor. I know I was drunk that night, but I don’t remember that happening.

“What the fuck?” I scream, grabbing her phone and looking through them again. “How the hell did someone get all these?”

“I’m not sure,” Kat says. “All I know is that somehow they were leaked to a non-friendly Logan Matthews gossip blog and so now this gallery is live with the headline ‘See the other side of the new Mrs. Logan Matthews.’”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I say, collapsing to the couch. My head is pounding. I feel like I can’t breathe.

“Who did this?” Logan barks. My eyes are just open enough to see him pacing back and forth across the living room. “Whoever it is, they’re fucking done. I’ll ruin them.”

“I don’t know,” Kat says. “Usually if it’s a blog or creator I’m friendly with, they won’t tell me who sent in what, but they’ll give me enough hints to figure it out for myself. But either they know that this site hates me or they just got lucky, because if I try to make a phone call, they’ll run a headline that I’m trying to pay them off. They’re that petty.”

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