Page 124 of Single Mom's Guide to Love

“Fucking wonderful,” I say, trying to control my breathing. “Logan, I’m so?—”

“No. Don’t you dare apologize,” he says. “We all have pictures from our youth that we’d rather not have in the public.”

“Logan, I know you’re trying to make me feel better, but your pictures are you looking dorky in eighth grade. Mine are of my tits on a Tuesday when I won a wet T-shirt contest to a song about a lollipop that wasn’t a lollipop. We aren’t talking about the same things.”

“You won?” Kat asks. “Nice.”

“Thanks, but not the point, Kat. What the fuck? This is… this is so fucking bad.” It’s at that moment that the actual gravity hits me. “Jayce…the custody case.”

The mood in the room drops even more than it was.

These pictures are out there now. I mean, they existed somewhere before this, but now they are available for the world to see, and because of who I married, this is going to circulate like wildfire. Which means that this is going to be brought up atthe custody hearing. Now Josh and Vivian can say that I work too hard, I’m never there, and apparently when I’m not there, I’m entering topless contests, always drunk, and making out with men in public.

“Oh God,” I say, starting to hyperventilate. I’m out of control. I’m spiraling. My head is spinning, and I can’t breathe.

“Love. Come here.” I hear Logan’s words and I feel his arms around me, but that’s it. “Shh…find the calm. We’re going to figure out who did this.”

“How?” I say between gasped breaths. “How do you find something like this? How do we stop this wildfire? Does it even matter who?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of this.”

I don’t know if I believe Logan. I don’t know anything anymore.

Because all I can think is this is it. This is the end of my road.

35

logan

I’ve pulledmany all-nighters in my life. Kat has been there to witness nearly all of them. But in all those years, and through all those cans of Red Bull, I don’t think we’ve ever worked side by side—or with more purpose.

Because we’re finding out where these pictures came from if it’s the last thing we do.

“I don’t care if it’s three in the morning. If you valued sleep you wouldn’t be in the business of fabricating celebrity news. So get your scrawny ass out of bed now!”

Ah, she finally reached the editor of the blog that posted the pictures.

“Now you listen here, you pencil dick weasel. You’re going to take those pictures down right now. You’re going to say that upon further review, you couldn’t verify them, and that you publicly apologize to Mrs. Banks-Matthews for the massive invasion of privacy.”

I can’t hear anything on the other end of the phone call, but my finger is ready to tap on the button of my mouse in a second when Kat gives me the signal.

Because yes, I’m about to shut down their website if they don’t agree to her demands.

Why? Because they fucked with my wife.

And I can.

“Oh, you’re not? That’s cute. So now…how about you get on your website? Why? Oh, just because I want you to see something.”

Kat gives me the nod, and with one click I’ve hacked into their servers, blaring an error message on the page that says their site is shut down. Also featured on it is the most unflattering picture we could find of him. It felt poetic.

“Oh…now you want to play ball? I figured you might.”

Kat continues to talk to the editor as I switch out my screen and try to figure out where these pictures came from. I ran every reverse image search I had—the legal and not legal ones—only to come up empty. Well, not completely empty. The photo of Maeve and I dancing the first night we met apparently had been circulating on the internet for a while, but somehow it never came up on Kat’s radar. Though that picture was innocent. The one that’s attached to the other pictures has clearly been doctored.

But who? Who would do this to Maeve? Or are they doing it to me?

That’s the other part of this—we don’t know why this is happening. On the surface, it looks like Maeve. But did they do it out of vindictiveness to her, or was it a way to get to me through her?

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