without taking a breath. “Some old trolls hijacked an archived thread and started saying major shit about Eden. I don’t want to lock it because everything that was there before is innocuous. What do you want me to do?”
I sighed. “I’m kind of busy right now.”
“Can you at least take a look?”
Crap. “Sure.”
“Thank you.” She paused a beat, then with renewed excitement. “Oh, and I just saw your text from before. Who’d you meet?”
There was no possible way I could drop any of this on her and still escape this bathroom in any reasonable time. And as I didn’t want anyone to suspect I had a bad case of the runs, I told the smallest truth. “That reviewer, Gabriel Sanchez.”
“Oh, right.” She sounded disappointed. “But that was kind of to be expected, right? I mean, eventually, you’d have to run into him.”
“True.” I zipped up my purse. “I need to go. I promise I’ll look into this as soon as I can, okay?”
“Thanks, Layla.”
I took a deep breath and held it. It was entirely frustrating that my one night in the vicinity of these ridiculously out-of-reach people would be ruined by my ridiculously out-of-touch hobby.
When I stepped back into the kitchen, Eden sat at the table, bouncing the sleeping baby gently in one arm while she tapped on her laptop one-handed. She bent to lay Joshua in the car seat, then stood. “I’m sorry. In all the chaos, I never asked you if you’d like a drink. You wanna come help yourself?”
“Sure.” I followed her around to the refrigerator which was crowded with beer bottles. I grabbed a Stella. “I hope you don’t think it’s rude, but I need to check something on my phone real quick.”
“Of course. Make yourself at home.”
I found the thread and started reading backwards. The ironically named PeaceAndLove spewed some bullshit, and she’d brought another friend with her to stir the pot. These jealous girls behaved as if Eden had stolen Adam away from them personally. Poor Ash had tried to squelch the trash talk, but she was too timid to bring the hammer.
I was not.
My blood pressure went up when I had to deal with hateful people, like I was going into an actual battle or confronting them face to face. I was good at it because I knew I was safe and they couldn’t hurt me. That was one reason I was so careful to remain anonymous. I could don my bad-ass persona when I needed to without fear of repercussions. They could hate my alias all they wanted, and it never made me feel bad.
Out of necessity, I’d gotten fairly proficient at typing tomes on my phone. When I was angry, my fingers flew. I posted my crackdown and then began deleting the offending posts back through when the drama started.
“That must be important?” Eden’s voice drew me out of my alternate reality.
“Oh. Yeah.” How to explain? “A friend wanted me to back her up in an argument.”
I stopped what I was doing and watched so-called fire-breathing Eden putting glasses away.
I’d been so mesmerized by Adam, I’d completely failed to process that I was hanging out with another musician, who to be honest was more infamous than famous. When her scandal hit the tabloids a few years back, fans speculated about her relentlessly. She had a career of her own—and her own fans—but to Walking Disaster fans, she was Adam’s wife. There were plenty who still thought she was a gold digger, unworthy to lick his boots.
The running narrative was that she was a harpy—rude to reporters, rude to fans. I kept a close eye on the forums whenever the topic of Eden came up—and she often did. I didn’t want to censor people, but I liked to remind them that Eden wasn’t a fictional character. She didn’t deserve to be raked over the coals by the very people who should show the most support for her. They could criticize her music all they wanted, but when they started to attack her personally, it crossed a line.
She reached into the fridge and brought over a can of Coke, then she tucked a blanket around Joshua. A little monkey that looked a lot like the one fans had sent peeked out from under the baby’s arm. When she stood, she arched her back, hand on her waist, striking such a quintessential exhausted mother pose, I had to smile.
“You seem tired.”
“Oh, yeah. We’re just getting out of the crying-all-night phase. Now he weighs so