Page 80 of Look What You Made Me Do

Everyone at the table picked up their devices except for Iris who leaned close to her sister to look at the iPad screen.

Ella’s fingers shook as she navigated to the Herald and clicked on the link that took her to today’s edition. Her heart thumped as she scrolled to page five to find it dominated by a picture of her and Jake standing on the front porch, the dogs in the foreground. Above, the headline screamed:

THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER

And just beneath that in slightly smaller print:

Former NFL jock slumming it in the suburbs.

Daisy grabbed the bourbon and poured an extra slug into hers and Iris’s mugs as a wave of nausea roiled through Ella’s gut. Her gaze dropped to the byline.

John Wilmott.

Part of Ella didn’t want to read the rest. But part of her couldn’t not read it either.

In a run-down house in the run-down southside suburb of Deluca, ex-Founders tight-end royalty, Jake Prince, whose net worth exceeds 100 million hides out in plain sight.

Ella blinked. Jake was worth one hundred million dollars? Sweet, Jesus. But that wasn’t what the article was about. Not by a long shot…

Two years after his career ended in great ignominy, Prince has quietly remerged as the unlikely coach to a high school football team that didn’t exist prior to this season. After turning down several lucrative coaching contracts, how did this come to be?

The answer to that possibly lies with the principal of Deluca High School, Ella Lucas, who hails from the same small Kansas town as The Prince. Ms. Lucas, it seems, is exceptionally persuasive, a talent she no doubt inherited from her mom who eked out an existence in Trently as the local hooker.

All the color leeched from Ella’s face. “Oh. My. God. Oh my God.” She rubbed a hand across her forehead. “Oh my God.”

Jake, always less wordy, just said, “Fuck.”

There it was, right there. The worse Iris’s cards had been predicting. On the cusp of getting the one thing she’d desperately wanted, she was about to lose probably the most important thing she’d gained since leaving Trently.

Her anonymity.

The article went on about her mother’s sordid history, including quotes from people in Trently, and repeated the old rumor that Ella had run away with her high school principal. It questioned her moral integrity, challenged the appropriateness of her being a role model for school children and her ability to raise her fifteen-year-old brother.

But Wilmott hadn’t stopped there. He’d done a little more digging and found out that Iris and Daisy, the two circus freaks – his words – that had taken Ella in after her scandalous exit from Trently, had never lodged a tax return. Suddenly they were tax evaders in the order of Al freaking Capone.

Glancing up from her death grip on her phone, Ella said, “You two seriously haven’t ever lodged a tax return?”

The sisters traded a look. “Never could wrap my head around those damn forms,” Daisy said, pouring another slug of bourbon.

Ella returned her gaze to the screen where John had moved on to their beloved dogs. Apparently, he and his photographer had been menaced by a pack of mangy, unruly, unregistered dogs. She flicked her gaze to the picture again that had caught Cerberus mid-wriggle, obviously ecstatic at the attention.

He ended with a lot of inference about the state of public education in Wisconsin intertwining it with a freaking treatise on the moral choices made by people who were in charge of impressionable students. Ella wanted to cut John Wilmott’s heart out of his chest and stomp on it.

Throwing her phone on the table, she buried her face in her hands. “I feel sick.”

“Fucking. Bastard,” Rosie muttered as she tossed her phone next to Ella’s.

“Can he say that stuff?” Ella asked, lifting her head.

Simon nodded. “Unfortunately. Most of the facts are essentially true. And he’s been really careful to wrap the more outrageous things in phrases like ‘it’s rumored’ and ‘sources say’.”

“Yep,” Jake concurred, his hand sliding onto her shoulder, his thumb absently stroking her collar bone.

Ella’s head pulsed like it was about to explode. Prior to today, the only people outside of Trently who knew her story were the people sitting at the table. Now everyone in Inverboro, anyone with a Herald subscription, knew her shame.

When Simon had alerted them to the article, Ella had been prepared to pick up the pieces for Jake. She’d had no idea that the media machine she’d so eagerly embraced last week to push her agenda would turn around and kick her in the teeth.

She’d brought this on herself.

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