Chapter 21: The Viral Clip and the Aftermath
The silence in the studio had become a physical presence. It wasn’t peaceful; it was thick and heavy, pressed into the corners, smothering the usual comforting scents of almond oil and lavender. Dee hadn’t gone home. Home meant a bed that felt too big, walls that echoed, and the ghost of a future that had dissolved.
She was curled on the floor, her back against the chrome leg of her styling chair, still in the clothes she’d worn to slap him two days ago. A pair of black jeans, a soft grey tank top. They smelled like rage and exhaustion.
Her phone, face-down on the polished concrete, buzzed.
She ignored it. It buzzed again, a persistent, angry insect. Then a third time, in quick succession. Not a call. Notifications. Probably Sarah, checking in. Or some client rescheduling. The world, blindly moving on.
After a long minute, she turned it over. The screen was a constellation of alerts. Tagged photos. Mentions. Mostly from her fan accounts. One name, from a notorious gossip aggregator, made her blood run cold for a different reason: Bomer Gets Real About His 'Hairstylist Bestie' – Shuts Down Rumors Cold.
Her thumb hovered. Every cell in her body told her to throw the phone across the room, to shatter the screen and the headline along with it. But a weaker, masochistic part, the part that was still trying to map the disconnect between the man she’d loved and the man who’d destroyed her, won out.
She tapped it.
It was a clip from The Rise & Shine Show, taped earlier that morning in New York. Matt sat perfectly poised in a sleek leather chair, the skyline behind him. He looked immaculate. A navy blazer over a white t-shirt, his hair artfully tousled. But his eyes, those famous blue eyes, held a hollowed-out flatness, a polish so perfect it betrayed the effort. He was on a promo tour for the new franchise film, a global press junket that had whisked him away from the wreckage he’d made in LA.
The host, a woman with a dazzling, interrogatory smile, leaned forward. “So Matt, we have to ask. The ‘Dee Phenomenon’. It’s out of control. Your fans have whole conspiracy boards, they’re editing your videos together, they’re convinced there’s something there. What do you say to your shippers?”
A practiced, gentle chuckle escaped him. He shifted, the picture of relaxed bemusement. “I say they have wonderful imaginations. Truly. The creativity is inspiring.”
“But the chemistry!” the host pressed, her voice a theatrical stage whisper. “The way you two look at each other in those videos. People aren’t making that up.”
Matt’s smile took on a patient, almost condescending quality. “Dee and I have a great friendship. She’s an incredibly talented artist, and I’m lucky to have her in my life. But the internet, right? It loves a narrative.” He spread his hands, a magnanimous shrug. “Sometimes a haircut is just a haircut.”
The studio audience let out a collective, understanding laugh.
The host wasn’t fully satisfied. “Come on. Be honest. There’s a look you get.”
His expression then did something brutal. It softened. His gaze drifted slightly off-camera, and it filled with a wistful, pitying kindness. It was the look you’d give a child who believed in unicorns. “I look at all my close friends like that,” he said, his voice dropping to a more intimate, confiding tone. “Dee is special to me. Truly. But she’s not that kind of special. I think… I think people sometimes project what they desperately want to see.”
Not that kind of special.
The words detonated in the center of Dee’s chest, a silent, shrapnel blast.
She watched the clip again. And a third time. Each viewing wasn’t about hearing the words, but about dissecting the performance. The careful modulation of his voice. The expert deployment of wistful pity. The absolute erasure of everything that had passed between them in the dark—the fevered whispers, the promises breathed into her skin, the naked vulnerability he’d shown nowhere else.
A haircut is just a haircut.
She saw his hands, those familiar, graceful hands, gesture casually. She remembered the exact weight of them on her hips, the way they’d cradled her face like she was something precious, not a projectable fantasy.
Her phone screen went dark. She sat in the resulting gloom, the only light the amber glow of a vintage lamp on her product shelf. The silence was absolute now, complete.
She picked up the phone, unlocks it. His messages were still there, a stacked column of unread blue bubbles.
Dee, please.
I need to explain. It’s not what you think.
Elara means nothing.
What I said to you… that was real. That IS real.
Talk to me.
The last one, from six hours ago: I’m in New York. I saw the clip. They edited it. It came out wrong.
Her thumbs felt numb. She tapped his name at the top of the screen, bringing up the option to block the number. A simple, final tap. A digital severance to match the physical one.
But she didn’t tap it.
Instead, she opened a new text window. She typed three words, her movements precise and cold.
I saw it.
She hit send. Then she turned the phone completely off, the little spinning wheel vanishing into blackness.
She sat there on the cold floor, in the beautiful studio she’d built for herself, surrounded by the tools of the craft that had brought him into her life. The man on the screen, the polished, hollow-eyed actor shutting down a narrative, was a stranger. But the man in those unread texts, the one pleading, was the ghost of the man she’d loved.
The disconnect was total. It wasn’t just that he had lied to her. It was that he was still lying, to millions of people, creating a reality where their history was a fiction invented by desperate fans. He was burying the truth—their truth—under a mountain of charming, condescending spin.
And she realized, with a wave of nausea, that he was probably doing it to protect her. To shield her from the media storm. To be the good guy. It was the final, unforgivable insult.
A sound escaped her, a raw, choked thing that was neither a sob nor a laugh. It was the sound of the last fragile thread of hope, the one she hadn’t even known she was clinging to, snapping.
She pulled her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around them, and lowered her forehead to rest on the denim. She didn’t cry. She just held perfectly still, waiting for the seismic shift inside her to settle into a new, permanent, and barren landscape.