Page 12 of Claim to Fame

"No. This will blow over. I appreciate the offer, but they’re not going to run me out of my own home. It will be fine.”

∞∞∞

It wasn’t fine.

If she thought there as an intimidating number of cameras outside her apartment before, it was nothing compared to the mob waiting for her when she returned home from Liv and Daemon’s. Thankfully, Micah had accompanied her, doing his best to shield her from the relentless press of the paparazzi as he helped her move between the taxi and her apartment’s lobby. He tried, again, to convince her to leave town, but she insisted she was fine, despite the way her hands shook.

Alone in her apartment, she tried to pretend her life hadn’t imploded at the hands of a self-centered former pop star. She’d thought they were friends. That they’d grown to understand each other during their months starring together on Broadway inBridget Jones’ Musical. Clearly, she’d been mistaken.

“Hannah, honey, what’s going on? Are you alright?” Her mother’s worry was somehow soothing, a familiar blanket she could wrap herself in even through the distance of a phone call. Her mother seemed no more flustered by the current media storm than she had when Hannah had sulked after being stood up for Homecoming sophomore year of high school. A gentle sort of concern always tinged with this-too-shall-pass practicality.

“I’m fine, Mom.” She searched the cabinets of her apartment for a tea bag—any tea bag—as water boiled in the kettle on the stove. “It’s all a misunderstanding.”

“Hank! She says it’s a misunderstanding!” her mother called to her father, forgetting, once again, to move the phone away from her mouth before she shouted into the other room. “Then you and Jackson are still together?” she asked.

Hannah hesitated. “No. We’re not together.”

Had never been together.

Would never be together.

She didn’t say that part.

“Oh, well, that’s a shame. Are you sure you’re alright? There are so many photographs of you on the television.”

“Why are you watching that?”

“How’d they get that one picture?” her father shouted in the background.

“What picture?” Hannah removed the tea kettle from the stove, pouring the steaming water over the tea bag at the bottom of her favorite mug, the one covered in illustrations fromPeter Rabbit.

“Hank, shush,” her mother scolded.

“What picture, Mom?”

“There was one photo on the TV that looked like you weren’t expecting them to take it,” her mom said.

“I wasn’t expecting them to take any of the photos.” There’d been the occasional photographer in the months since she and Jackson had debuted their fauxmance, but nothing like this. Nothing that interrupted her daily life.

It’ll all blow over. By tomorrow, they’ll move on to something else.

“There, I texted you a link. But really, honey, don’t be too hard on yourself. No one photographs particularly well before they’ve put on their makeup.”

“What are you talking about?” Hannah put her phone on speaker and opened the link her mother had sent.

Her screen filled with an image of herself, hair knotted in a messy bun on the top of her head, in an oversized Carnegie Mellon t-shirt and tiny black shorts. The same oversized t-shirt and tiny shorts she’d slept in the night before. This was a photo of her coming out of the bathroom that morning, the camera’s flash reflecting off the mirror behind her.

“What the hell?” she said, taking the phone and moving across the apartment to the bathroom.

“What is it? Hannah?” her mother asked.

But Hannah couldn’t answer. She was staring at the exact angle of the photograph in her hand and there was only one way that image could have been taken—from the fire escape outside her living room window.

Someone she didn’t know had climbed her building’s fire escape to take a photograph of her through the window. Someone had sold a photograph taken of her in her own apartment without her knowledge or consent.

Cold sluiced down her spine as she pulled the curtains closed, moving feverishly from one window to the next until she’d blocked out all the daylight.

“Hannah? What’s going on? Are you okay?” her mom asked, her calm concern morphing into something more frantic.

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