I headed back home after hugging them goodbye, and forced myself to not look at my phone for the duration of the walk. For the first few steps, it felt impossible, but then I noticed my breathing slowed, my chest unclenched, the muscles down my back relaxed, just a bit. I let my focus fall elsewhere: the places where tree roots had cracked the sidewalks, the ancient gas lamps that still flickered outside some of the austere homes in the neighborhood, the daffodils that suddenly seemed to be everywhere. For the first time today, I felt good. Normal. I was going to be okay.

A few steps from my front door, I reached for my phone out of habit, without thinking. There were alerts everywhere. In my texts, messages from reporters at the Daily News and NYN. In my email, messages from a producer from CNN, and from some German newspaper, the name of which I couldn’t quite understand. And a message from Lola—no surprise, the British tabloids love u—with a link to the Daily Mail.

“Holy crap,” I said out loud to myself as I stood there gawking at my phone. The world’s worst meet-cute had been turned into an adorable romantic comedy that everyone was talking about.

Starring me.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Hayes

1:07 p.m. My cousin Perrine was exactly seven minutes late to our standing biweekly lunch date. Not one to waste free time, I waited for her on the sidewalk while scanning through work emails on my phone, tapping out one-word replies and filing every message in its appropriate home until my inbox was back at zero. My shoulders relaxed an inch the second the last email was deleted, only to rise back up when a meeting alert popped on the screen for my call at two thirty.

“Hey,” Perrine said with the huff of someone who had just jogged three blocks, tapping at my arm. I gave her The Look—yes, she’d dubbed it this sometime in high school—and leaned in for a hug. The Look was part scowl, part exasperation, part adoration. Perrine and I always fluctuated between laughing at and being annoyed with each other. “Staff meeting ran late,” she said with a shrug as we queued up at Greener Things behind every other hungry New Yorker working in Midtown Manhattan. She never apologized for work, and I never expected her to. “I literally save lives, Hayes,” she’d said to me the one time I complained about her being late for a breakfast we’d scheduled. I’d kept my mouth shut after that.

“Well, my day has been hellish, so don’t worry about it.”