Jocelyn’s POV
The first photo appears at 6:47 AM.
I'm still in bed when my phone buzzes with a text from Maya: ‘Don't look at Twitter. Seriously. Just don't.’
Which of course means I immediately open Twitter.
Someone has pulled an old photo from the foundation's launch event two years ago. It's a group shot—me, Zayden, half the board, some major donors. Everyone smiling, champagne glasses raised, celebrating the opening of our second location.
Except now my face is circled in aggressive red marker. Digital Sharpie slashed across the image like I'm a target in a crime scene photo.
The caption reads: ‘This is the woman who knew. Who married him anyway. #VivienneDeservesBetter’
The tweet has been retweeted four thousand times.
I scroll down and find more. Different photos, same treatment. My face circled, sometimes with arrows pointing at me, sometimes with text overlays calling me complicit, calculating, mercenary. One particularly creative troll has Photoshopped devil horns onto my head.
The other woman.
Gold digger who ignored the warnings.
Probably helped him cover it up.
Each image has been shared hundreds, sometimes thousands of times. People I've never met dissecting my expression in photos taken years ago, finding evidence of guilt in the way I'm standing, the angle of my smile, whether I'm touching Zayden's arm.
"Jocelyn." Zayden's voice comes from the doorway. "Maya texted me. You're looking at it, aren't you?"
I don't answer. Can't tear my eyes away from a photo someone pulled from my personal Instagram—a candid shot from our wedding day, me laughing at something off-camera.
"Give me the phone." Zayden crosses to the bed, hand extended.
"They're destroying every good memory we have." My voice sounds detached, clinical. "Taking moments that were real and beautiful and turning them into evidence of my moral bankruptcy."
He sits beside me, and I angle the screen so he can see the latest post—a side-by-side comparison of me at our wedding and Vivienne at her interview. The text reads: ‘One woman's celebration is built on another woman's trauma.’
***
The office feels different the moment I walk in.
Patricia glances up from reception, then immediately looks away. Her usual morning greeting dies unspoken, and she busies herself with papers that don't need organizing.
"Morning," I say anyway, forcing normalcy.
"Morning." The word is clipped, professional, stripped of any warmth.
I continue down the hallway toward my office. Two staff members are talking near the water cooler, but their conversation stops abruptly when they notice me approaching.
They exchange a look I'm not supposed to see before scattering in opposite directions.
No one makes eye contact.
The silence follows me like a shadow. Doors close as I pass. Conversations halt mid-sentence. Even the interns who usually greet me enthusiastically suddenly find their phones fascinating when I walk by.
I'm a ghost in my own foundation. Present but unseen, or worse—seen but deliberately ignored.
Maya finds me in my office twenty minutes later, door closed, staring at my computer screen without actually processing anything on it.
"You okay?" she asks, though we both know the answer.
"They're avoiding me." I state it flatly, no emotion. "People we hired, trained, worked beside for years. They won't even look at me."
"They don't know what to say." Maya sits across from my desk. "The photos are everywhere, the comments are brutal." She leans forward. "For what it's worth, I don't believe any of it. Neither does Landon or David. We know you, we know Zayden."
"But everyone else…."
"Doesn't matter." Her voice is fierce. "You can't control what strangers think. You can only control how you respond."
I want to believe her, want to think that truth eventually wins, that people will see through Vivienne's lies. But I'm watching my reputation disintegrate in real-time, and belief feels like a luxury I can't afford.
My phone buzzes. A notification from the foundation's general email: ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. How do you sleep at night knowing what your husband did? Women like you make me sick.’
I don't recognize the sender. Just another stranger with opinions about my life.
"They're emailing the foundation directly now," I tell Maya, showing her the screen.
She grimaces. "Patricia's been filtering those all morning. We've received forty-seven since the office opened."
Forty-seven emails from people who've decided I'm guilty by association.
"I need to make a statement," I say. "Something that distances the foundation from Zayden's personal—"
"No." Maya's response is immediate. "That makes it look like you believe the allegations. Like you're trying to save the foundation by throwing your husband under the bus."
"Then what do I do? Sit here while our staff treats me like a pariah and our donors flee?"
"You keep working, show up every day, act like the truth matters because it does." She stands. "I'll talk to the staff, remind them that professionalism means not treating their boss like a criminal based on social media speculation."
After Maya leaves, I try to focus on actual work. There are grant applications to review, program evaluations to complete, a meeting with our youth services coordinator in an hour.
But every time I look up from my computer, I catch someone staring through my office window.
Not openly—just quick glances that snap away when I make eye contact. Assessing. Judging. Wondering if the woman they've worked with is really who she claimed to be.
By noon, I can't take it anymore.
I text Zayden: ‘I need to leave. Can't do this today.’
His response is immediate: ‘Ten minutes. Stay in your office.’
I wait, watching the clock, feeling like I'm suffocating in this glass box where everyone can see me but no one will acknowledge my presence.
When Zayden appears in my doorway, his expression is tight, controlled. "There are reporters out front. Three different networks, plus freelancers with cameras."
"How do we—"
"Secured corridor. Service entrance in the basement." He glances down the hallway, then back at me. "We need to move now before they figure out the access points."
I grab my bag, leaving everything else. Let them speculate about the half-finished work, the abandoned office, the executive who fled in the middle of the day.
Zayden leads me through a side door I've never used, down a stairwell that's technically for emergency use only. His hand is firm on my lower back, guiding me when I stumble on the concrete steps.
The basement smells like cleaning supplies and recycled air. Harsh fluorescent lights flicker overhead as we navigate past storage rooms and electrical panels. This is the foundation's underbelly, the unglamorous infrastructure that keeps the building running.
"There's a service entrance that opens onto the alley," Zayden explains, his voice echoing in the empty corridor. "Car's waiting. Tinted windows. Driver knows not to use the main streets."
He's thought of everything. Planned our escape route like we're fugitives instead of people running a legitimate nonprofit.
"Is this what our lives are now?" I ask as we reach the heavy metal door. "Sneaking out of our own building through service corridors?"
Zayden pauses, hand on the door handle. "Until Vivienne's lies stop trending, yes. This is exactly what our lives are."
He pushes the door open, and daylight floods the dim corridor. I can hear traffic from the street beyond the alley, the normal sounds of the city continuing while my world implodes.
The car is idling exactly where he said it would be, dark sedan with windows so tinted I can't see inside.
Zayden opens the back door and I slide in, grateful for the immediate privacy. He follows, pulling the door shut, and the driver accelerates smoothly away from the building I can no longer safely enter through the front door.