Page 19 of Every Broken Promise
She didn’t look like she believed me, but Ronnie started to call after her, and she needed him to stay off her back if she wanted to break a juicy story.
When she came back, she looked deflated.
“What’s wrong?”
“Ronnie wants me to back off from Mayor Callahan.”
I just raised my brow at her.
She looked back at me like her hopes and dreams were crashing around her.
“What Ronnie doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” I shrugged.
She didn’t answer, and I didn’t take it personally.
Instead of trying to write, I opened up the email account I created when I started working on my column. People loved gossip—especially when it was about people they knew. Even more than that, they loved encrypted gossip they could sink their meaty little hands into and figure out themselves. Well, it wasn’t too encrypted either because everyone had a short span of attention nowadays.
I might have felt a bit bad for using some of the information my mom gave me from work, like how they believed one of her coworkers was cheating on his wife.
Cheating scandals were like catnip to people. And I mean, the wife deserved to know, and if my veiled post in my columnhad sent her in the right direction, then I would have done the sisterhood a great service.
All it took was one anonymous post in the back of the newspaper, and I was getting emails from people wanting to expose more secrets.
In the span of three weeks, my column went from “A little bit of heart,” a quirky little column that highlighted feel-good stories around town, to being a local gossip girl. My feel-good stories were still there, but no one cared about them. All everyone wanted was that last little box with a blind item. That last paragraph had overtaken anything else I was writing about.
Animosity was my best friend at the moment.
If I cared what people thought of me, I would have never returned to town, and if I thought people had forgotten about little old me or the fact that I was back, all I had to do was look at an email I had gotten detailing the events that led me to leave town in the first place.
Did people not pay attention? I mean, did they forget I worked for the newspaper? The confessions were posted anonymously, and even if they didn’t think I was the one posting, they had to know my coworkers would tell me if someone was talking shit about me. All that aside, my littleGossip Girlmoment was keeping me afloat and with a job.
It’s not like I wanted to do this forever. I had been playing around with an idea, but it required me to get off my ass and go out and about our county. I wanted to highlight some of the stores in Oakhill Creek and Willow Grove. Especially now that there was talk about a township being formed with Sunny Pines.
The only thing that stopped me from moving forward with that idea was sooner or later, I would end up at Kanes’ Auto. I wasn’t ready to go back there.
When I looked at Orianna she looked as defeated as she had when she left Ronnie’s office.
I had offered my help, but she denied it.
Instead, I clicked another email, which contained a picture of my new neighbor, Rachel, and the mayor’s son.
I liked Rachel, and if I wanted to be invited over for coffee in the mornings, I needed to protect her, so there was no way in hell I was going to unleash rumors about her.
A girl had to have her priorities straight.
It was Saturday night,and I was feeling sorry for myself. How many weeks in a row had I spent with my parents now? It was too depressing to keep count.
My daddy took us out for breakfast earlier in the morning. They knew I was avoiding mingling in town, so we ended up going to a cool brunch place forty minutes away from Oakhill. This gave me a chance to dress up. Brunch practically screamed ruffles. I wore a cropped baby blue shirt that had ruffled short sleeves and a pair of high-waisted jeans. They were a little on the tighter side, and that would cause conflict with the unlimited mimosas the brunch place had going on, but my ass looked phat in them, and I’d do just about anything to have a phat ass—just not working out daily.
I had my priorities, and working out daily was not one of them.
One day, I would be a gym girly—or so I gaslighted myself.
I washed my hair and gave myself a blowout. I loved a good blowout. If I had the money, I would be at the salon weekly and have a stylist deal with washing and drying my hair. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t replicate the feeling of a salon blowout.
It was all the things I now did that separated me from the girl I used to be. Old me would have called now me high maintenance. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to take care of the skin and body you are in.
With my hair, cute outfit, and winged eyeliner coming out evenly on both sides, I felt like I could take on the world. All that brunch goodness, plus the unlimited mimosas, was good for my soul.
