Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 135517 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135517 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
I guess Mom and Dad thought they’d done their job by helping me get Ryder to the altar, and now I was expected to pay them off for the rest of my life. Something I never minded, not in the beginning, anyway. But that was before I knew the hell that my life would become before I knew that just because I tricked someone into marrying me, that didn’t mean that he would one day come to love me.
“You’re going to get the focus back on that little bitch and off of my family and me. We’re losing business and contacts left and right. Our show is now in jeopardy, and the empire I spent my life’s blood building is about to be destroyed because you were too stupid to handle one sickly beaner.”
“Here!” She grabbed an envelope from her bag and slapped it down on the counter in front of me. “It’s all in there. Get to work on it by tonight.”
“What is it?” I picked up the envelope and turned it over in my hand.
“You know very well that stress is the worst thing for Elena; I want you to keep the pressure on. Once you release this, everyone’s attention will be diverted, and it’ll give me some time to come up with something long-term. Don’t disappoint me again.”
She turned and left before I could say anything, not that I would have. Why isn’t she asking her daughters to help this time around? It’s as if they’re all going to leave me standing on my own to save their own skin.
The things that were leaked about them weren’t very nice either, but at least they weren’t the ones who the whole world was laughing at because their husband had been missing and the lies they’d told to hide the fact that they didn’t know where he was had been exposed.
I opened the envelope and read the slip of paper before burning it as instructed at the bottom. I guess Mary wasn’t taking any chances since all the evidence pointed to all of us being hacked. Her instructions weren’t anything new, just the same old same old with a different story.
We’d figured out, or I had, that stress makes Elena relapse both mentally and physically, which causes her to have to take more medication, which in turn causes her to pack on the pounds like a fat kid at a pie-eating contest, and pretty fast too. This is my favorite thing to do to her because I hate the fact that she’s still so pretty.
I hate even more the comparisons people make between the two of us, with me always coming up lacking. I’d barely had any work done, thankfully, but Noel and Nicole, along with their whole family, were getting the worst of it when it came to that because they’d rearranged their whole faces and bodies to the point that no one remembered what they’d looked like originally, so I don’t really care.
But all anyone could talk about on the internet is how women who had cut their bodies to change their looks were fat-shaming a woman who never had any surgery done to enhance her beauty and, worst, was fat only because of the medication she was forced to take to stay alive.
It irked me to no end that, once again, the world was on her side. It hadn’t always been this way. There was a time when things were going very well when the fans had accepted me, but it wasn’t long before I realized that that was just some very good PR work going on behind the scenes and that most of the fans who were giving me well wishes were nothing more than bots that Mary and the others had bought to build my reputation.
It hadn’t taken long, though, for the tide to change, especially after that idiot got sick, something I still to this day think she’d done just to get under my skin. Just like that, things had changed, and everyone was on her side once again, and then the accusations started.
Suddenly Ryder and I were the bad guys, and people were throwing dirt on me. What made it worse was that there were no paid bots, real or AI. These were real people who identified and sympathized with her.
That I could’ve probably dealt with as Mary herself had told me that it would die down soon and I’d be everyone’s favorite again, and I believed her because even though my dad had never made it big, my aunt had and I’d learned from her experiences that the people in this town changed like the wind.
But the thing that bothered me more than anything else in this world, other than the fact that my husband was still in love with her, was the fact that she never responded. No matter what I do, she just goes about her merry way as if to tell the world that she’s better than me, and I hate that.