Page 60 of Toxic

It was sick. It made her sick.

She closed her browser and hoped her dad would never see the vitriol spewed. What was said was bad enough, but the intent behind it was more cutting and more painful.

She didn’t wonder for long who was behind this. There was only one person twisted enough to think of this as a ploy for revenge. What she couldn’t figure out was why it had taken Trey so long to concoct this plan and what he expected to gain from it. He’d been found out, called on it, and, in guilt or embarrassment or shame, he’d hightailed it away from them. Gone to ground, which was fine with Miranda, who had hopes of never seeing him again.

One of her biggest fears was that he would come back and try to lay claim to her father’s money. Wasn’t money the end game for all con artists? Theywerelegally married, after all, and Washington was a community property state. If something should happen, say, to her father… The thought made her ill.

Where would things stop against her dad? Or was it only the beginning? Painful as all these bad reviews were, they were child’s play and couldn’t do any serious damage to her father’s sales. At least she didn’t think so. He was too established and had too large of a fan base. If he was just starting out, a campaign of hate like what she’d just discovered could have been devastating, career ruining.

But these reviews displayed only cruelty and not even any kind of real criticism.

With a heavy heart, Miranda realized that her next question afterwhywas simple.

What’s next?

She shuddered.Why do I feel as though this is just the opening volley in an organized attempt to bring Daddy down?

She debated whether she should show him the reviews. They would only hurt his feelings. Long ago, he’d sworn off looking at reviews, unless they were sent to him by his agent, Ricia, in which case the review would be laudatory, worth celebrating. She wouldn’t want her prize cash cow to be demoralized, especially so much so that he might contemplatenotwriting.

But the one exception he made was when he had a new book out.Thenhe looked and that would usually lead him down a rabbit hole of checking out the reviews on his backlist. On both Goodreads and Amazon, it was very easy to sort reviews by date and to quickly peruse them in reverse chronological order.

Sooner or later, he’d see these. Miranda could only hope they weren’t too painful to look at. Of course, Daddy would realize that the reviews came from Trey. He’d realize it was a smear campaign from what amounted to a mentally unbalanced hater. So the reviews themselves wouldn’t smart so much, but the intent behind them would. No one liked to realize that someone went out of his or her way to make life unpleasant for someone else.

There was little to be done. Sites like these were loath to censor so-called reviewers. You had to do something pretty terrible (besides your basic, run-of-the-mill character assassination and attempting to destroy the career of an author whose sole aim was to bring some entertainment into readers’ lives) to get a review removed. She knew it would be hopeless to report one or all of these.

She got up and poured herself a mug of fresh coffee. Standing at the kitchen counter, she gazed out at the perfect summer day and chastised herself for spending it as she had so far, concentrating on the painful and unpleasant. She had until the end of the summer to complete her own horror novel for school (and hopefully for eventual publication), so there was that. She could be working, seducing the muse, as her dad called it.

And even if she wasn’t being practical or diligent, she could certainly take advantage of the day’s warmth and sunshine. Their condo building was one of the few in Seattle that had its own outdoor pool and it was a lovely one—large with sparkling turquoise water. She could grab a book (or the manuscript of her own book) and curl up on one of the lounge chairs, maybe get a bit of a tan or at least a few more freckles.

She promised herself she’d follow a sensible plan and combine work with pleasure. Her father was a grown man. He could safeguard himself. Her care for him didn’t have to extend to policing social media. No, she’d send her manuscript to her Kindle and then go outside and swim and sunbathe the afternoon away. Drying off and sunning, she’d reread her book and see what needed to be done to polish it. Maybe later, she’d call her old roomies, whom she hadn’t seen in weeks, and see if they wanted to meet up in Ballard for few potables and maybe dinner. The vegetarian Thai restaurant, Jhanjay, over there was amazing.

Yes, it all sounded like a reasonable plan. Healthy. Stimulating.

And what did she do? Follow her own plan? Oh no, that would make too much sense. Instead, she sat back at the table and brought up Twitter. Her dad had a publicist who ran his account and set up timed tweets about Alfred Knox books, of course, but also about writing, reading in general, and the fabulous totally fictional life of the author. People bought it, so much in fact that his followers numbered in the tens of thousands.

She saw the pinned tweet for his latest book and then scrolled down.

And stopped, gasping.

She looked back up to confirm it was indeed Connor’s Twitter page. She wanted to believe she’d clicked and somehow changed to a porn profile.

The image made her face hot and her stomach churn.

It was Daddy, on the bed in this very condo (and apparently recently), lying on his back, naked and fully aroused. This kind of shot would never survive Facebook’s censors, but Twitter was much more tolerant of stuff like this.

The tweet beneath the X-rated pic was:

My friends call me Connor Ryman. DM me if you wanna drop by my Dexter Avenue fuck pad and take advantage of what you see on display. #AuthorsBareAll #nakedmen

This wasn’t something Miranda could simply let go. She scrolled down a bit more, but found nothing similar, thank God.

She quickly went over to Facebook and saw that his profile pic had been changed to a bare ass.

She checked out Instagram and found dozens of nude pics of her father. His dick was covered by various book covers to keep it relatively clean.

She went back to Twitter.

And almost missed the news. But there it was, in the constantly changing feed. One of Connor’s followers was the local Seattle newspaper, and it was there she saw what made her catch her breath and burst into tears.

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