There was no evidence of prior abuse, physical or verbal. Sure, I’d heard him yell at her over the phone. Sure, there were rumors that he could be absentee, that even when giving his child a bath, he was prone to neglect, to forgo instructions or supervision. But the police didn’t care about that. To anyone who knew them, they were a content couple, with normal rifts, normal make ups. Nothing to see here.

Huda told me to take more time off. And I thought, I thought that it was an act of grace, as Twitter was flooded with death threats, Facetuned images of me sucking penis, my high school yearbook photo with darts through my eyes, semen on my face, a deepfake of my face blasted through with a rifle on a video, bone-chillingly real. Child Killer.

Child killer. Because to so many, Tom—and I, by association—had killed not only a mother, but a child, too. An unborn child.

I tried to go back to work. Huda said no, no, take more time off. I stayed inside the apartment. Quinn brought me food. I didn’t eat it. I wasted away. I had had the foresight to delete Instagram even before the paparazzi showed up, but I still searched my name. I marveled at all the creative ways you can hate a person, especially a person you don’t know. It was my unwholesome oxygen, no choice but to breathe it in, this malice from phalanxes of people who wanted me dead for a murder I didn’t commit.

But if I didn’t commit it, it was still my fault they were dead. That last text conversation was leaked, too, the one in which I told him his family was the reason I didn’t want to date him. All my pals, the ones who wanted me murdered, too, raped with AK-47s and then shot through my uterus, they were right. I, with my excuses, my flimsy attempt at asserting boundaries with a man I’d only gone on three dates with, had caused all of this. It was like being given a power I couldn’t contain, a magic spell gone horribly awry with fatal consequences.

Of course, logical people and decent media outlets didn’t blame me. But giving grace doesn’t equal clicks. And the people most fascinated by the story were the ones who wanted to assign me the role of villainess, who needed a living scapegoat.

My friends, my colleagues, sent apologetic, perfunctory texts. I reached out to the ones whom I’d known for years, saying how broken and lost I felt. There were a few short exchanges, but no one wanted to touch me; no one wanted to be associated with me. No one knew how to handle me, the mess I’d made. My deliberate avoidance of meaningful relationships ricocheted right back at me.