Page 65 of What Comes Around

Her comments were disabled.

She did not allow anyone to challenge her version of the story.

After that, she started posting old photos, a curated nostalgia tour. And of course she included her fourteenth birthday picture, the one where I was in the frame with a bad acne flare. Subtle as a brick.

But Amy didn’t let it slide.

She posted an old clip from Apple’s Juilliard days, back before Apple was thrown out. A casual party video, someone filming the room, catching the exact moment Apple shoved an empty wheelchair down a staircase. The owner had been carried downstairs earlier to use the bathroom, leaving the chair at the top of the steps. A double amputee. The chair was destroyed.

The comments exploded under the video, because the burner account Amy used didn’t disable them.

That incident had been a mystery for years. The community had even raised money to buy the owner a new chair. No one had ever known how the original one was damaged.

Until now.

People dug up the old GoFundMe. Internet sleuths connected every thread. Suddenly, every drama channel had fresh ammunition.

Then former Juilliard students started speaking up.

They said Apple was a mean girl. That she had not left the school by choice. She had been expelled. They said she had slipped laxatives into a competitor’s drink so she could win a competition. That was why she had been thrown out, not because she “chose a different path,” like she had told her followers.

With every new expose, there were fewer people defending her in the comments. And more people are demanding that she be canceled. That she disappear from the internet entirely.

Fame and popularity had always mattered more to Apple than anything else. The numbers, the followers, the headlines, the constant validation. She needed it the way other people needed food or sleep. Without it, she withered.

And I was going to take it all from her.

I watched her meltdown unfold with a kind of quiet fascination. Every denial she posted, every desperate attempt to rewrite the narrative, how she tried to paint herself as the victim, it all made her look more unhinged. She didn’t even realize it. She thought she was fighting back. But she hadn’t even hit the bottom yet.

Amy still had plenty of ammunition. Years’ worth. And she wasn’t dumping it all at once. She released things slowly, letting each scandal burn just long enough to dominate the internet before dropping the next one.

Every time Apple tried to claw her way back up, another piece of her past surfaced. Another lie exposed. Another person came forward. Another thread unraveled.

I wanted her to lose her mind. I wanted her to feel the same slow, suffocating panic she once inflicted on me. In another life, she had chipped away at my sanity piece by piece, and now I was watching the cracks form in hers. It was almost poetic.

She was going to fall further.

Because I wasn’t done.

Chapter 21: One Pump and Done

It had been a week since the office explosion. Knox was back to taking me to client meetings, inside the building and outside, acting like everything was normal. Like we hadn’t crossed a line neither of us could uncross.

But I saw the cracks.

The subtle looks. The way his eyes lingered when he thought no one noticed. And his attention always returned to my hair.

I wore it differently now.

Some days I wore it down, long and blonde, brushing the middle of my back. When I did, I made a point of tucking it behind my ear, slow and deliberate, knowing he watched every movement.

On those days, he could not look away. His gaze kept drifting back to me, like he was fighting himself.

Other days I wore it up, the way I always had. And every time, Knox had that look, the one that said he wanted to reach out and undo it.

One morning I tied it into a high ponytail, sleek and tight. When we walked up the staircase to the mezzanine, I made sure to stay just a step ahead of him. My ponytail swayed side to side with each step.

I wanted him imagining what it would feel like to grab it, to pull it.