Cleo nodded. “And to give you control over your own narrative. Get your power back. Which is an avenue I appreciate.”

“I still wish I could just sue the person who posted this,” I said with a resigned sigh.

“Of course you do.” Cleo immediately puffed up into scholar mode. “But you actually have no legal recourse here. As we’ve discussed.”

“Just go out there, set the record straight, say thanks, and drop the mic, Fran,” Lola said, pausing her endless phone-tapping. “In and out, easy-peasy. You’ve got this.”

I exhaled, feeling a little bit more at ease. In the past forty-eight hours, we’d discussed my “rip-cident” at length. That’s what Teen Vogue had called it. I called it mortifying, with no chance of going away anytime soon.

“You’re right. I can do this.” I paced a few steps, as if moving my body could stamp out the nerves.

“You also said you wanted to see Hot Suit in the flesh again,” reminded Cleo, in between bites.

“To say thank you!” I protested. “That’s it.”

“Oh, come on, we all want to see Hot Suit in the flesh,” Cleo said with a smirk. “Look, sometimes the universe does provide, in the form of a hot piece of ass.”

Lola shrugged at me. “Okay, she’s not wrong there.”

I twisted my hands together, wringing my fingers. “Seeing him again seems like a terrible idea now. Especially in front of, I don’t know, a gajillion freakin’ people?”

Cleo’s eyes followed me as I fidgeted around the room—sitting down, standing, unsure of what to do with my body. “You should eat something,” she said.

“What, and barf all over him after I’ve already wiped snot on his shirt?” I said, smoothing my dress, an old standby red sheath purchased at Zara a few years ago. “I’m sure he’d love that.”

There was a knock at the greenroom door, and Eliza, the producer in charge of my segment, strode in, with Priya, the makeup artist who had done my full face an hour earlier, at her side. “Hey, just giving you a ten-minute heads-up,” Eliza said matter-of-factly, as if appearing on TV were the most normal thing in the world. She was one of those people who talked at you but was always busy looking somewhere else. Priya gave me a sweet smile and began dabbing powder across my nose with a giant brush.

“We’ll have the jacket out onstage, to the right of your chair, so you can give it to him when he comes out,” Eliza said, eyeing something on her clipboard.