CHLOE BAKER'S LOST DATE

Chapter Thirteen: The Venn Diagram

The Buzzfeed article comes out a few days later, and it's like I predicted. Suddenly, I'm the villain of the day in romancelandia because I used someone else's book to try to find a guy.

I could've kept that to myself and made up some story about how I'd come up with the campaign, but I'd told too many lies about it in the first place, so I decided I had to come clean in the interview. I told my story like it is—the date I was supposed to be on, the date I ended up on, the plan I made to try to find the man that got away. I kept it short, but factual, but it was enough.

Before all this, I had 75 Twitter followers and I'd get a like maybe once a week. Now I have over 2,000 and my mentions are insane.

@ChloeBakerCincy Don't use authors to advance your personal life.

@ChloeBakerCincy It's hard enough to try to sell books these days without some desperate millennial using you for clout.

This girl should get Fi-red. #cancelchloebaker

@ChloeBakerCincy Bitch, bye.

Etc. No matter that the author of Most Wanted had been happy with the publicity and tried to defend me. No matter that it was getting people checking out the BookBox, which meant more book sales, which was good for romance writers in general. Oh, no. Chloe was actually trending in certain circles. My name!

I mean, it wasn't only my name. That's the problem with trends on Twitter. Sometimes it's just a lot of people tweeting about a bunch of different people with the same name. And there are more people named Chloe out there than I thought. But at least half of those tweets were about me and how I should be cancelled, and even though I should've been happy about that because it was increasing my chances of finding Fake Jack, I wasn't.

No one likes to be a villain.

And it didn't work, anyway. Fake Jack didn't appear. No one identified him. The Venn diagram theory was all for nothing. I almost lost my job, I earned the disdain of thousands of people, I even got my mother calling because of course some friend of hers had read the article in Cincinnati and told her all about it.

"Why didn't you tell us you were going to be in the paper?" she said after I let the phone ring three times and considered letting it go to voicemail.

"It's not the paper. It's just some stupid online article."

"About you dating a boy?"

"No." I sigh. This is the only thing my mother has been vaguely interested in in my life, it feels like, for what feels like forever—whether I'm dating someone or who. When I told her I was moving to New York to start a new job, all she said was, maybe you can find a man there. I had no idea why she cared so much about it. I wasn't under any illusion that she was hankering for grandchildren. Maybe it was the pressure she was receiving from her social circle—the ladies at the tennis club that she still went to on a regular basis, the only thing she seemed to take pleasure in.

"What about this other man?" she asked.

"Real Jack?"

"What?"

"Jack Dunne. The man I was supposed to go out with."

"Yes, that's right. Where is he?"

I turned my desk chair around from Jameela and Addison's prying eyes. "I've been on a date with him."

"And?"

"It was fine, mother. What's it to you?"

"Can't I call my daughter and inquire about her life?"