"Hmph," said her grandmother. "Well. That's more than I would have. Now go eat something. And put your coach on the phone. I want a word with that man."
* * *
In a hospital bed on the fourth floor of St. Catherine's Medical Center, one hundred and sixty kilometers to the south, Brooke Halston was also watching the six-second video, for what she estimated was the two hundredth time.
She was not in the hospital because of her ankle. Her ankle was sprained, as the tall woman had said it would be, and wrapped in a tight beige bandage, and propped on two pillows. She was in the hospital because at two o'clock that morning, alone in her apartment on the twenty-sixth floor, she had stood up from the bathroom floor, where she had been sitting for three hours with her phone, and the room had tilted sideways and gone gray at the edges, and she had woken up on the cold marble with a cut over her eyebrow and her heart racing so fast she could not count it, and had been so frightened that she called the only number she could think of, which was her mother's. Her mother had called an ambulance from four hundred kilometers away. The doctors said it was exhaustion, and dehydration, and a panic attack severe enough that she had fainted, and that she had not, as far as they could tell, eaten a proper meal in several days. Her mother was now sitting in a plastic chair beside the bed, asleep, with her coat still on and her purse in her lap, having driven through the night.
Brooke did not remember very much about the night. She remembered the video. She remembered sitting on the bathroom floor and watching the numbers climb under it, and the comments. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Most of them on her side.
That was what had done it, in the end. Not the eviction notice. Not the email from Gary. Not the meeting with Lumière, which she had missed, and which her agent had called at nine-twenty to tell her, in a voice like a closing door, had gone to the other girl. It was the comments. Tens of thousands of strangers, telling her how sorry they were. How brave she was. How they hoped she was okay. How they hoped the violent woman who attacked her would go to prison. Hashtag justice for the girl in red. Hashtag stand with Brooke. Her follower count had gone up by sixty-one thousand in twelve hours. More than it had gone up in the previous two years combined. Three brands had sent her direct messages asking if she was available for collaborations.
She had sat on the bathroom floor and watched it happen and understood that she was finally, after two years, winning. And that she was winning because of a lie. Because of six seconds that left out everything that mattered. Because of a version of the morning in which she had not screamed in a stranger's face over a gas pump, had not grabbed a running fuel nozzle with both hands, had not said make me, had not nearly set herself and the tall woman and a three-hundred-thousand-dollar car on fire in the rain on the corner of Linwood and Fifth. In the version on the internet, she was the victim. In the version on the internet, she was the good one.
She had never felt so much like nothing in her life.
Her mother stirred in the plastic chair and woke up and looked at her, and Brooke turned off the phone and put it face down on the blanket.
"Hi, Mama," she said.
Her mother did not say anything. She got up out of the chair and sat on the edge of the bed and put her arms around Brooke and held her, the way she had not held her since Brooke was a little girl in a small town working at a frozen yogurt shop and crying about a boy, and Brooke put her face against her mother's coat, which smelled of cigarettes and the car's heater and the cheap vanilla perfume her mother had worn for thirty years, and cried. The other kind. The real kind.
"I did something terrible," she said, when she could speak. "Mama. I did something really terrible. And everybody thinks somebody else did it."
"Then tell them," said her mother.
"I can't. It's too late. Everybody's seen it. Everybody's decided."
Her mother pulled back and held Brooke's face between her two rough hands, which were chapped and red because she worked in the kitchen of a nursing home and had for nineteen years, and looked at her.
"Brooklyn Rae Halston," she said. "It is never too late for the truth. Not while you're still breathing. You hear me? You called me. You're still here." Her chin trembled. "So you're going to get some sleep. And then you're going to tell them."
* * *