Page 87 of Fake It For Glory

JENSEN

The chaos around me was suffocating, and I felt like I was drowning in a sea of panic and anger. It took a good twenty minutes for my body to stop vibrating with the betrayal. A part of me, that part that fell hard for Merida, kept telling me it was okay. There was an explanation. But she had betrayed me in the worst way possible.

My heart was broken, as was my soul. The one time I took a chance on someone had blown up in my face.

I stumbled into my chair and sank into the buttery leather. I could hear the buzz of my busy office. I had no doubt in my mind the article was sending shockwaves through the whole building. The people that worked for me were reading all about my deepest, darkest secrets.

She had exposed me. It would have been better if she stripped me naked and made me walk through my office and out into the city streets. That would have been better. My body was just the outside. She wrote about the inside. She exposed who I was under the bespoke suits. My world had been shattered into a million pieces.

I sat there for a while, numb and unable to comprehend what had just happened. My mind was racing with a million thoughts, but I couldn’t seem to grasp onto any of them. I felt like a shell of a person, hollow and empty. The betrayal had cut deep, and I didn’t know how to move forward from it.

But then, something inside me snapped. A fire ignited in my chest, and I knew that I couldn’t let her win. I couldn’t let Merida destroy me and everything that I had worked for. I had to fight back.

I grabbed my phone and dialed my lawyer’s number. “I need you to do whatever you can to stop the article that was published about me today.”

My lawyer promised to look into it but told me not to get my hopes up. Apparently, free speech was protected.

I hung up and tried to get my shit together. I thought back to all the moments I had shared with Merida, all the times she had looked at me with those beautiful eyes and made me feel like she truly cared about me. It all felt like a lie now.

There was a soft knock at the door before it pushed open a few inches.

“It’s me. Don’t throw anything at me.” Hattie walked in carrying a tall white cup and a paper bag. I knew exactly what it was. “Banana milkshake, onion rings with extra fry sauce, and an order of jalapeno poppers.” She put it on my desk, then unwrapped the straw and stuffed it in the cup. “Drink.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Drink the shake and eat,” she said. “You need comfort food. You eat while I talk.”

I took a drink of the shake. Whenever I had a shitty day at school, Dad would either take me out for a banana shake or make one at home for me. It wasn’t just good. It was like getting a pat on my back from my dad. This morning, I wished he was still alive to see my success. Now, I was glad he wasn’t here to see me falling on my face.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

She cringed. “It’s not great. Carl will be here soon. Susan is putting together a statement. The phones haven’t stopped ringing. I’ve directed my phone to go straight to voicemail. We need to come up with a plan.”

“She cost me the launch,” I said.

“Not necessarily. We’ll get ahead of this. I need to reread the article. I was too pissed the first time. We’ll pick through the piece, find the problems, and formulate a counterattack. We’ll spin it. You know Carl is a master at his job.”

“I need to meet with the department heads,” I said. My brain was shifting from shock to action.

“I have it scheduled in thirty minutes.”

“Good. Thank you.”

“I need to go to my office to, well, to figure out what comes next,” she said. “I’ll see you at the meeting. Try and take a deep breath. We’re going to get through this.”

I sucked on my milkshake while scanning email after email. Shit was hitting the fan. I couldn’t focus on the tech because I was putting out fires. The article had spooked the people that I was partnered with. I had maintained a very good, clean reputation. I had never been tainted by scandal. In one fell swoop, Merida had destroyed years of hard work.

It was a wild couple of hours. I was grateful for the milkshake Hattie brought me earlier. It was the only thing keeping me going.

Hattie and I were operating at full speed, trying desperately to contain the damage that had been unleashed upon my reputation. Investors were pulling out left and right, their faith in me shattered by the damning Full Disclosure article.

All the success and goodwill I had built during my marketing tour had evaporated into thin air. Nobody wanted to align themselves with the man they were reading about in the newest Full Disclosure column. The allegations, the twisted stories, they were like poison, spreading doubt and mistrust like wildfire.

I couldn’t escape the mounting pressure, the weight of it all bearing down on me. Hate mail flooded my inbox, and social media was a battlefield of anger and accusations. The carefully crafted image I had worked so hard to maintain had crumbled, leaving behind a trail of disappointment and scorn.

Every phone call, every email, every news article seemed like another blow, another reminder of how far I had fallen in the eyes of the public. The stress gnawed at me, a constant presence that left me feeling on edge and powerless.

The road through this would be long and arduous. I would have to fight tooth and nail to rebuild the trust I had lost. But in that moment, all I could feel was the anger and frustration that threatened to consume me as I grappled with the fallout of a single article that had turned my world upside down.