Chapter 3

Two days later Sterling Dynamics' verified communications account posted a statement:

I, Julian Sterling, have been separated from Clara Harrington for over a year due to irreconcilable differences. Ms. Harrington has refused to cooperate with divorce proceedings due to disputes over asset division. I have filed to petition for divorce at the conclusion of our mandatory two-year separation. My relationship with Vivienne Ashford is legitimate. Statements suggesting otherwise — including those made on Ms. Harrington's recent broadcast — were the result of deliberate manipulation on her part. Everything else circulating online is false.

Black on white. And upside-down from reality.

The tide of public opinion flipped in twelve hours. The diehards in my audience still didn't buy it. They waited for me to speak.

My firm called.

"Clara. Don't bother coming in tomorrow. Your conduct is incompatible with our partnership agreement. We'll be invoicing you for the non-compete breach."

I knew exactly whose hand was on that call.

I looked at the seven-figure breach fee. I went to wire it. My accounts had been frozen thirty minutes earlier.

I scraped together every receipt I had. The marriage certificate. A year of text threads proving we'd been happily married up until three weeks ago. I posted the whole package.

Ten seconds. Every platform took it down.

I tried to go live to defend myself. One minute in, my ten-million-follower account was permanently banned everywhere at once.

I called him. I was crying so hard I could barely speak.

"Why are you doing this to me? Aren't you afraid I'll bring a bigamy case?"

He laughed, quiet and tired, on the other end of the line.

"You said it yourself on the air. The evidence is thin. And even if it weren't — you can't win against my kind of money, Clara. There are still people who doubt Vivienne. She cries herself to sleep every night. Post a clarification and the accounts come back."

I was going to tell him to go to hell.

He said one more sentence and it cut my legs out from under me.

"Clara. I found a kidney match for your mother."

My mother was diagnosed with end-stage renal failure complicated by heart failure three years ago. Dialysis wasn't working. She needed a transplant and the American waitlist was years out. Julian had been running a private search overseas.

"What are you saying."

"I'm saying what I'm saying." His voice was distant and easy. "Whether the kidney gets delivered is up to me. You want to watch your mother die?"

I felt my fingernails sink into my own palm until the skin broke.

"Julian. How can you use my mother against me? She gave you her retirement savings. She gave you the trust fund she had put aside for me — every cent of it — to seed your company. And now you have money, and power, and this is what you do?"

I was sobbing.

In the end I said: "...Fine."

The next morning I sat in front of a million viewers and read what Julian had written for me.

"My husband and I separated a year ago. I refused to sign divorce papers because I was trying to extract more money. On my last broadcast, I deliberately manipulated Ms. Ashford into saying what she said, out of spite. I have hurt her, and I have misled all of you, and I am sorry."

The chat didn't just break. It was a tidal wave. Every slur you can think of, a thousand times a second. Gold-digger. Hag. Hanger-on. A disgrace to the bar.

The doxxing got worse. My driver's license photo was everywhere. My phone exploded. Strangers left voicemails describing things they would do to me. Someone made deepfake pornography with my face and pushed it onto every forum that would have it.

When I asked Julian to pull some of it down, he said: "She almost killed herself. This is nothing. You keep eating it until she decides you've suffered enough."

The one piece of good news came from the hospital: the transplant had gone through and my mother was stable in recovery. I wept with relief and drove there through a city that spat at me.

Sterling Medical Center was private and tightly controlled. None of the noise got past the front desk.

I thought the worst was behind me.

On the third day a group of strangers pushed into her room. They screamed in my face. My mother, barely out of surgery, had never been exposed to anything like it. She started shaking. She grabbed my hand.

"Clara. Is any of it true? What did you do?"

Before I could answer her, she pressed a hand to her sternum and her eyes rolled back.

They wheeled her into a trauma bay. The cardiac specialist who had been managing her heart was not in the building. I called Julian from the hallway.

"Julian. Please. My mother's crashing. Where's the cardiologist you set up for her?"

Silence. Then, annoyed:

"He can't come. Vivienne tested positive for pregnancy yesterday. Her heart's fragile, I need those specialists on standby for her. Your mother's got her kidney. She'll live."

He hung up.

The heart monitor flatlined sixty seconds later.

I lost her.

I dropped, too. Cardiac strain, they called it. I woke up two days later in the same hospital.

I buried my mother alone.

Then I climbed to the roof of our building, opened my phone, and started streaming.

If the only way to prove I was innocent was to die, I'd die.

I was on the edge when a message pinged.

Wait. I have proof of Julian Sterling's bigamy.