Chapter 2 - The Ghost in the Feed
The hospital room smelled of sterile iodine and cold plastic, a scent that clung to the back of my throat like chalk. Every shallow breath I took sent sharp, electric tremors radiating along the lower band of my ribs where the thoracic vertebrae were crushed. Beside my bed, the heart monitor chirped with a relentless, mechanical rhythm that felt completely detached from the chaos tearing through my life.
I stared at the glowing screen of my phone, my fingers trembling so violently I nearly dropped it onto the scratchy cotton blanket.
*I have the video. Your sister planned the whole thing. And Audrey, there's something else you need to know about what your parents did after you fell.*
My thumb hovered over the keypad. My mind spun through a dozen faces—bridesmaids with synthetic smiles, catering staff in black waistcoats, distant cousins who had watched me plummet with champagne flutes still frozen in their hands.
*Who is this?* I typed back, the screen blurring behind a sudden surge of angry tears.
The three typing dots appeared immediately, pulsating in the digital silence.
*It’s Chloe,* the reply came. *Taryn fired me as her maid of honor forty-eight hours ago because I wouldn't help her stage a ‘viral entrance shocker.’ Audrey, she didn't just push you. She set up a tripod behind the ficus trees on the mezzanine. She brought in a micro-mic specifically to catch your voice when you screamed.*
Nausea struck me, hard and acidic. I remembered the slight, glittering lens caught in the corner of my eye just before my heels left the balcony floor. I remembered Taryn’s fingers—cold, manicured, unyielding—pressing into the exact spot on my mid-back where my orthopedic brace had ended. She had known precisely where the previous stress fracture was. She had sat in the doctor’s office with me three weeks ago, nodding sympathetically while the surgeon warned that any severe blunt trauma to my spine would result in irreversible spinal cord transection.
She hadn't forgotten that warning. She had weaponized it.
Before I could process Chloe’s revelation, a second message arrived, this time with an attached PDF document.
*Look at the timestamp on this,* Chloe wrote. *While the EMTs were cutting off your dress, your father wasn't arguing with the venue manager about guest privacy. He was signing an emergency indemnification agreement. And your mother wasn't crying. She was at the administrative desk downstairs.*
I dragged my finger across the screen to open the PDF. It was a digital copy of an emergency medical proxy revocation and a financial power-of-attorney execution form, bearing my forged signature in unsteady black ink.
Below it was an electronic bank transfer confirmation from my personal high-yield savings account—the account containing the three hundred and fifty thousand dollars left to me by my maternal grandmother, money meant exclusively for my upcoming corrective surgeries and independent living trust.
The balance remaining in my account was four dollars and twelve cents.
The recipient account belonged to *Vanguard Elite PR & Legal Defense LLC*—a boutique crisis-management firm that represented high-profile influencers and politicians caught in catastrophic scandals.
My parents hadn't just stood by while their golden child attempted to cripple me for views. They had plundered my medical lifeline to hire a digital cleanup crew to scrub Taryn’s record before my blood was even dry on the marble floor.
The door to my trauma room suddenly clicked open.
May you like
I whipped my head toward the entrance, a jolt of agony searing down my cervical spine.
Standing in the doorway, wearing an immaculate charcoal suit and carrying an untouched bouquet of white lilies, was Evan.
