Page 34 of The Layover

Pants it was.

As I was telling myself it was okay I hadn’t brought my entire wardrobe of flattering denim, my phone rang.

Lyndsay was our social media manager at The Raphael Group, and if she was calling this late, her time, I had to assume she’d seen the news.

“Hey, girl,” I answered brightly.

“Don’t give me that.” Her tone was light, despite the scolding. “What is this?”

I swallowed the defiant urge to pretend I was clueless about her question. “The wedding stuff?”

“The wedding stuff. If Kandace and the other partners see this, they’re going to freak out. They will see it.” Lyndsay’s job was to help our clients build and maintain a positive public presence. Normally she’d start working with Raul and Diego a month or two from now, as they drew closer to needing more press.

She was going to have to start now, and start with whoever this person was they’d brought on.

“I’m looking into it now,” I said. This was what I got for taking a day off yesterday. Stupid, Carly. “I’m meeting with them this morning to find out how it happened and figure out damage control.”

Lyndsay tsked. “No. Get me answers, but I’m on damage control. I’m already spinning something up in my head and I’ll have you details in the next few hours.”

No mention of the fact that she’d be up all night if she did that. And I was on the verge of begging forgiveness for sleeping through it happening in the first place. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. I know you’ve got me on this,” Lyndsay said. “Send over any details when you get them, and I’ll add them to the campaign. Fortunately the truth is buried in the news, so I can pull out the fairytale of the magical church wedding, and we’ll build on that.”

I sighed. “Okay. I’ll keep you updated.”

On the cab ride to the building, I scrolled through the headlines related to my marriage to Diego and Raul. The first few, from the bigger outlets, were all the same story over and over. One place had published it and everyone else ran with the same.

The problem with that was that so many places only took the headline and the about sections from the original. The more articles I scanned, the fewer mentioned the entire wedding was a kid’s game.

I did find sites with retractions. Brief statements that read we reported earlier… and we were incorrect.

That would be the majority of them later, but please let the real news be enough to make people forget the fake.

An email arrived from Lyndsay with the subject line Hot Takes.

It was a series of links to social media posts. All of them featuring a version of the wedding headline, and an opinion.

Disgusting.

Woke culture gone wrong.

Beautiful.

Heartwarming.

The world needs more of this.

Two men in a loving relationship, raising a daughter, and they still have enough love to bring a woman into their life. FLOVE.

One of them was just a string of crying emojis that ended with a heart.

At the end, was a note from Lyndsay. It’s almost too bad we have to squash this. Half the world loves the three of you together.

The words pinged in my chest, though I wasn’t sure why.

Yeah, too bad. Thanks for the links, I sent back.

I got to the church, and headed inside toward the kitchen, where we were starting demolition. As I drew closer, the voices that drifted to meet me made my gut fold itself into a pretzel.

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