Page 9 of While You Were Trending

Time has no meaning when your head is full of wet sand and the tide between your ears keeps making your nausea worse, so I have no idea how long it takes me to go downstairs.

I think I’m going down.

I haven’t been this hungover since—well.

Since.

When I was a different person in a different season of my life.

I finally reach the bottom of the stairs in the Victorian mansion that currently houses six of us, all of whom have touched the worst kind of fame in adulthood thanks to social media and the court of public opinion. Mabel has built a family and a home for us here, all of us first invited as a step to recovering from our viral moments of hell, then invited to stay longer because we fit.

Voices drift down the hallway from the kitchen.

Mabel.

I hear Mabel.

And a guy.

Not Ten.

Not Heath, the resident handyman who’s raising his daughter across the vineyard from our main house and dating Cricket, another friend who came to live here when she went viral several months back.

Not Walter, the elderly neighbor who dates Pip.

Not Mike, who better not be here, since he and Caro are supposed to be off on their honeymoon. He did enough last night, being the person to finally convince my mother to leave with part of his security team so that she could recover from her ordeal in the ridiculously expensive suite he booked for her at the most exclusive hotel across the pass in Napa.

I love my new brother-in-law.

He knows what he’s gotten himself into—he was friends with Ten long before he dated Caro—and after all of his success in Hollywood, he has the means to solve nearly any problem.

I wander toward the voices because they’re in the same direction as the coffee, when they start making sense.

“Why would we not capitalize on Declan saving the entire barn after a…sparkler…mishap?” a voice I don’t recognize says.

If I thought I wanted to throw up before, I want to even more now.

“Documentaries aren’t reality shows,” Mabel says. “It’s a firmno. The agreement is for you to film the restarting of winery operations, not to make more drama than will undoubtedly come naturally as we get rolling.”

My sludgy brain registers that Mabel must be talking to the producer of Declan’s documentary series about us.

They approached Mabel after the producer got an invitation to Caro’s wedding and heard that we were planning to rebrand and reopen.

I could’ve said no.

Could’ve refused on behalf of all of us, and none of my friends here would’ve blinked. We all get veto power over anything that would make us uncomfortable in our home.

But Mabel and Pip saved my life by inviting me here after I tried to stop my ex’s wedding. They’ve helped me not only find where I belong but learn to embrace who I am and who I want to be.

And the winery’s in financial trouble, so we’re coming out of post-viral hiding to reopen things around here.

To save our home.

If we could keep living here privately and quietly forever, we would, but we need money to pay off loans that Pip’s husband took out before he died to build the event space where we hosted Caro’s wedding yesterday.

“We could pay more,” the woman says.

“And I could find a different documentary crew to record what’s happening here,” Mabel replies.