Chapter 18 — Going Viral

POV: BEATRIX

I woke up to forty-three texts and a phone that would not stop buzzing. I almost didn't check it right away. Old habit.

Waking up to a flood of messages used to mean something had gone wrong: some new headline, some fresh disaster to manage before breakfast.

It took me a full minute, lying there and letting the phone buzz itself quiet, before I finally picked it up.

The clip had gone up sometime overnight: a clean thirty-second cut of the flour, the laugh, the smile. By the time I opened my eyes, it already had numbers attached to it that didn't feel real. Millions, not thousands. Millions, climbing higher every time I refreshed the page, comments piling up faster than I could read them.

Someone had already given it a name: “The Flour Incident.” It was trending, whatever that actually meant, high enough on some list that three different morning shows had already asked to air it during their broadcasts.

I went out that afternoon just to get milk, nothing dramatic, and got about four steps past the lobby doors before a woman stopped me on the sidewalk, her phone already out.

"You're the flour lady," she said, delighted, as if she'd spotted a celebrity in the wild. "From the cook-off. Can I get a picture?" I said yes because I didn't know how to say no to something so strange.

By the time I got to the store and back, three more people had stopped me. One man said he'd watched the clip eleven times, and he seemed proud of it.

A teenager asked whether Nikolai was really as scary in person as he looked in his old photos. I told her he mostly just looked that way when he was concentrating. She seemed disappointed by how normal that answer was.

Not everyone was kind about it. One comment under the video called me exactly what Julian used to, just dressed up in nicer words.

I closed the app before I could read the rest. Old habits die slow, and I wasn't ready to let one bad comment undo an entire good day.

Nobody had ever looked at me like that before. Not with cruelty, not with pity, just simple, uncomplicated delight, like I'd done something worth smiling about instead of something worth managing.

Ivy found the whole thing hilarious. She'd made me watch the clip with her four times that morning, laughing just as hard on the fourth viewing as she had on the first, and pointing at the screen each time the flour landed, as if it were still a surprise.

My friend Maya called that evening, which she rarely did anymore. "I saw it," she said, laughing before I could even say hello. "The whole internet saw it. I'm proud of you, and also deeply jealous of your flour technique."

I hung up, still smiling, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, being the object of attention felt like something I could keep rather than something waiting to be used against me.

****

POV: NIKOLAI

Priya called before eight in the morning, which never happens unless something has gone very wrong or, apparently, very right.

"Sponsors are thrilled," she said, barely able to contain herself. "Two of them already asked if we could use the clip in official materials. The board chair called it the best thing that's happened to the brand in a decade."

I had spent four years building a careful, controlled public image, one press release at a time, and none of it had moved the needle the way thirty unscripted seconds of flour had overnight.

There was something almost insulting about that, if I thought about it too long. Years of careful strategy had been outpaced by an accident with a bag of flour. I decided not to mention that to Priya.

Meridian's lead partner called me personally that afternoon, something I had never received from him in six weeks of careful, formal correspondence. He didn't mention the deal directly. He only said he had seen the clip, and that his wife had made him watch it twice. I found I did not mind the irony as much as I had expected.

Arthur called later that evening, too, his voice doing what it always did when he wanted something without asking directly. He mentioned the clip only once, in passing, then spent the rest of the call asking pointed questions about the stadium financing instead. Some things, apparently, never changed.

I didn’t tell him about how Beatrix looked, laughing, with flour on her nose. Some things were not his to comment on, no matter what he thought he was still owed for raising me.

What stayed with me longer than any of the calls that day was walking beside Beatrix and watching a stranger's face light up at the sight of her. Not at the sight of me, not at my name or my money. At her.

I watched her handle each stranger with a patience that surprised me, given how little of it the last several weeks had left her. She smiled for every photo. She thanked every stranger like they'd given her something instead of simply taking something from her.

I had spent most of my adult life being looked at for what I owned. I was finally beginning to understand what it felt like to watch someone be seen, at last, for exactly who they were.

Whatever this was becoming, I found I no longer wanted to call it a contract, even in the privacy of my own mind. I did not yet know what to do with that feeling. I only knew I wanted to keep watching it happen.

****

POV: JULIAN

I watched the clip for the first time at six in the morning, before I was fully awake, because someone had sent it to me with no message attached, just the link, which told me everything I needed to know about how it would make me feel before I even pressed play.

I didn't recognize the number. Some acquaintances thought this was funny, cruel, or both. I never figured out which.

I watched it again an hour later. I told myself the first viewing was just curiosity. By the second, I stopped pretending I had a reason.

Evelyn was in the kitchen behind me, saying something about a brunch we were supposed to attend, some names I was meant to remember for people I didn't care about. I wasn't listening.

Things with Evelyn had gone thin lately, the kind of thin that happens when two people realize they picked each other for reasons that don't hold up once the excitement fades. She had started leaving her things at her own apartment instead of mine. Small things. A toothbrush. A charger.

The kind of quiet retreat that happens before anyone actually says the word breakup out loud. I used to think that would bother me more than it did.

I watched the clip for a third time as she spoke, Beatrix laughing with flour on her nose, that man's face doing something I had never once seen it do in any photograph I'd studied of him. Smiling. Actually smiling at her, as if she was the only person in that entire studio.

I never once smiled at her like that. I never had a reason to. She was convenient, reliable, easy to shape into whatever I needed her to be, and it had never occurred to me that another man might look at her and see something worth grinning about on live television, in front of an entire city.

I used to tell people she was low maintenance, like that was a compliment instead of an admission that I had never bothered to find out what she actually wanted.

Watching that clip, I realized exactly how much I had never bothered to notice.

Something in my chest tightened and turned ugly as I watched it, an old feeling I recognized from long ago and did not like meeting again.

My hands had grown cold around my coffee cup, which seemed absurd to notice given everything else happening in my chest at that exact moment.

"Julian." Evelyn's voice was sharper now, closer. "Are you even listening to me?"

"Yes," I said, not looking up.

"You're not," she said, and for once, she was right, though not for any reason I planned to explain to her.

I wasn’t listening to her. I was watching the clip for the fourth time — the flour, the laugh, the smile that, apparently, now belonged to someone else, and I didn’t say a single word to Evelyn about any of it. I just kept watching.

Somewhere beneath the jealousy, quiet and unwelcome, sat something that felt uncomfortably close to regret. I did not look at that feeling any more closely than I had to.

I eventually set my phone down, the screen still glowing with a paused frame of her laughing, and told myself I would stop thinking about it by morning. I did not believe myself, even as I thought it.

Already, somewhere in the back of my mind, I was wondering when I would next get the chance to see her in person and what I would say when I did.