Where was an agony aunt when you needed one?

Oh.

Wait.

I was one.

With a sigh, I carried my laptop into the kitchen and set up on the island. It was one of the few rooms we’d made serious modern changes to, and one of those was power outlets on the island.

I opened it up and loaded the internet browser. I was the only person awake right now, but I opened a second browser window and opened the webpage of the nearest garden centre, just in case anyone else woke up and came down.

I logged into the Lady Love Tumblr account and stilled. There were more than five hundred asks since I’d last logged in before the storm, and that didn’t even include the actual website where I blogged answers and took questions.

Crap.

I was going to be here for-bloody-ever.

The only problem with being the first person to wake up was the lack of ready-made tea for one to pour.

Sigh.

I chose the lazy route and fetched the carton of orange juice from the fridge with a glass. It wasn’t quite the same as a nice cup of tea, but it would have to do for now.

I got to work on the ask box on Tumblr. As I’d suspected, a good portion of the asks were either follow-ups from the anonymous askers, spam, or nice men in various countries proclaiming to be African royalty or the executor of an estate from a long-lost relative.

They all wanted my bank account details, naturally.

After deleting all the ones that didn’t need my help, I went ahead and got stuck in to responding to the people who did, starting with all the people who wanted to know where they could find out their love language. After replying to a few and linking them to my pinned post—where they could find the website—I was finally able to help actual people who could use their eyes.

So many of these messages didn’t need help, per se, but reassurance. Reassurance that they thought they were doing the right thing; was this the time for that conversation? Was dinner the right thing for a first date? Was being honest with a friend the right choice?

The thing was, most people already knew all these things. At least subconsciously. Wildheart_risk, for example, one of the rare non-anon askers, already knew that she needed to be honest with her friend and tell her that she’d kissed her brother. She simply needed someone who she deemed an expert to tell her. And one anon who admitted they were fifteen and from somewhere in the United States needed reassurance that they didn’t need a big, flashy promposal—that a small bunch of their favourite flowers was more than enough.

I’d had to Google what a promposal was and then I’d fallen down an Instagram rabbit hole.

I still wasn’t entirely sure I understood it.

Seemed like a lot of work for some social media clout, if you asked me.