Page 101 of Begin Again, Part 2

Eden read the texts, convinced she'd lost her mind. Either that or her friends were on some bad LSD trip. She called them on a four-way call. Trying to make sense of her life via text was proving ineffective.

"Can someone tell me what the hell is going on? I went to bed last night with the man of my dreams, only to wake up this morning alone and horny as a toad, and the world's gone crazy!" she said as soon as their lines connected.

"It's not about to get better." Lydia had to douse her with a healthy dose of reality. "Congrats bitch, you've made the front page of all the major tabloids. You are officially famous!"

"No!" Eden shook her head. There was no way she was on the news. She hadn't done anything newsworthy.

"Yes," Sienna chimed in. "The whole world is in a tizzy. Everyone wants to know the identity of the woman Liam left the Convention Centre with last night."

"Your photo is splashed all over the tabloids, and you guys broke the internet twice this morning!" Cassandra delivered the final blow.

Her legs wobbly like jelly, Eden sank back on the bed. "God, no! This is not happening! How did this happen?"

"Well, I'm guessing you were blind drunk, and Liam carried you out of the venue, and the paps caught your grand exit," Lydia filled in the blanks for her. She sounded thrilled, like she was enjoying all the furore. But then again, there was a reason she was the second lead in a struggling soap opera. She lived for drama.

"I only had three glasses of champagne. I was not blind drunk," Eden clarified, well aware her state of intoxication last night was the least of her concerns. The ten missed calls from her parents and the two-word text from her mom instructing her to 'call home' made sense now.

"Edie, are you alright?" Cassandra's voice pulled her out of her panic.

"I'm good," she lied, pinching her nose. She was far from good. She should have stayed in the Blue Mountains, where nothing ever happened.

"Can we talk about Liam's therapy, please? The comments are blowing up. Our site went down quite a few times this morning," Sienna had far more important concerns on her mind. "Do you have any idea what this means for Claire? If she cracks this story, she'll get the Sleaziest Journo of the Year Award—"

"I could be wrong, but I don't think that's an award you should be aiming for," Cassandra interrupted her.

Eden barely paid attention to their exchange. Her mind was spinning with a million questions, painfully aware of how bad the story in Dirt looked for her. She was the only person with intimate knowledge of Liam's therapy visits, and now his secret was splashed all over the internet. How was he supposed to trust her now after this garbage? She had to contact him and assure him she wasn't the leak. But first, she had to convince her best friend to kill the story real.

"You have to kill the story, Si!" Eden blurted out as she bit her nails anxiously. There was a long pause on her friends' end before they all spoke at once, demanding an explanation from her.

"It's not my story to kill," said Sienna.

"Yeah, Edie, it's already out there," Lydia agreed. "Besides, it's not like there's any truth to it."

"I doubt she'd want to bury the story if there wasn't some truth to it," Cassandra argued.

"Edie, are you there? Say something?" Sienna screeched. "I mean, you're going to have to give me a little more. Is it true Liam's seeing a therapist? Sure, Claire has photos of him leaving Medical Mews, but there are tons of doctors in that building. She swears up and down though she has an informant, and she plans to drop some serious receipts over the next few weeks. They're already calling it the 'Liam Leaks' at the office."

Eden took a long deep breath and weighed all her options. She could go with the truth and hope Sienna wouldn't betray her trust, or she could skirt around it.

"Is it true his dick doesn't work?" Lydia asked the one question with the potential to send Eden into the emergency room. For a frightening second or two, she thought she'd already died of cardiac arrest because she couldn't hear her pulse.

"Don't be ridiculous," Cassandra said dismissively. "He made Aiden, didn't he? And Edie's been glowing a lot lately. You don't get that glow unless you're properly fucked."

"Or pregnant," Sienna observed.

"And the only way to fall pregnant is to get fucked."

Convinced she'd go mad at their ridiculous banter, Eden grumbled, "I'm not pregnant!"

"How do you know? People don't glow unless they're pregnant or swimming in cash."

"Because I have an implant!" she sighed and began pacing the room.

A few months after Aiden was born, even though she wasn't in a relationship, she insisted on getting an implant because there was no way she'd ever go through the trauma of giving birth again. She tried not to think about Aiden's birthday in a negative light. Some days, though, she still woke up in a cold sweat from the all too familiar nightmare because the horror of that day refused to leave her. One minute she was in the middle of Grammy's bathroom, about to step into the shower, and the next, she felt something warm seep down her legs.

To her horror, it wasn't her water breaking like she'd thought, but a rapid rush of blood pooling at her feet the longer she stared at it. A large part of those gruelling five hours, between being rushed to the hospital and finally holding Aiden in her arms for the first time, was a fuzzy blur.

Eden remembered Grammy holding her hand in the ambulance while she drifted in and out of consciousness, promising her she'd be okay as they raced her to the hospital one town over, but she couldn't remember how she got inside the vehicle or who called for help.

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