Rebecca chewed her lip. This was a fair point. “Do you want me to talk to her about it?”

“No,” said Morgan. “I don’t want her to feel sorry for me. I just want her to be like she was.”

34.

Alexa

In her room, before she left to babysit Katie for the second time, Alexa checked Tyler’s Instagram feed. No new posts. Then she logged out and logged back in as Tyler—his password for literally everything was laxattackertyler—and checked to see if he’d been tagged in any recent posts or had any DMs. And here was Tyler with his two brothers—one two years older, one a year younger—and some random Silver Lake hottie, a girl in short shorts and a completely unimaginative tank top from, like, Target or something, and she was completely ratchet. Cleavage all over the place, an arm around Tyler and another around his younger brother, Conor. Hanging with the boyz from back east, said the caption.

Oh please, thought Alexa. She looked more closely, and she saw that Tyler’s arm was around this girl’s waist. She looked for Conor’s hand. It was by his side, just as it should have been. She checked the time on the post. Twenty-three hours ago. So this was what Tyler had been doing when he wasn’t calling or texting Alexa. She considered making a snarky comment on the post in the guise of Tyler, but forget it. This girl (@silvergurl) wasn’t worthy of a comment. Alexa checked @silvergurl’s feed. Lots of selfies, lots of thirst traps. Typical.

Fine, she thought. Let him.

Then she checked her Silk Stockings Instagram account, which was different from her personal account, the one her mom had on her own feed. Alexa hardly ever posted on her personal account—an occasional sunset, a cute photo of Bernice, just to stay in the game. She posted on the Silk Stockings account any time she put up a new video, pointing her 21,000 Instagram followers to it. Nothing fancy, just a tasteful selfie (tasteful, @silvergurl!) where she displayed her outfit of the day and summarized the topic of the video. She thought she’d probably gotten a lot of new viewers that way, although there was no way to tell exactly where they’d come from.

Cam’s Instagram was mostly golf-related. Alexa didn’t spend much time there.

Her direct messages were as open as the day was long. To be a public figure you had to make yourself available. That was part of the game.

Direct message from @jt76 to @silkstockings via Instagram: Heading to L.A. soon, huh? You’ll love it out here!

She clicked on jt76’s profile. No photo. Followers: zero. Following: one. Silk Stockings.

Okay, possibly jt76 was creepy. Or he/she was a talent scout, setting up shell accounts to contact potential clients. She’d heard of that happening.