“Figure a lot of things out.”
“Like what?”
“Like a lot of things.” It was a dismissive response, and we both knew it.
“You don’t have to tell me… but I’m a good listener,” Ford said. “And I’m nosy as hell so I’d really like to know.”
That last bit made me laugh, but it was short-lived as I thought more about my situation. If Ford really wanted to know, then I would try to give him a real answer. “I want to move on, to figure out what I want to do with my life now. But I also feel like I don’t really know what caused things to go so wrong in the first place. So I feel like I have to figure that out before I move on.”
“Sometimes things just happen,” he said.
“Are you one of those ‘everything happens for a reason’ people?” I gave him the side-eye.
“Hell no. My philosophy is more like ‘shit happens.’”
“Mine too.”
“So is it really all that important why bad stuff happens? Isn’t it more important to move forward?” In the dim light, I couldn’t see his light green eyes very well, but I could imagine them, the way they sometimes seemed to penetrate my soul.
“Probably… but if I don’t know why it happened, then I can’t be sure it won’t happen again.”
“You seem like the kind of woman who can do whatever she puts her mind to.”
“You barely know me.”
He shrugged. “I know enough. You’re strong, mentally and physically. You enjoy challenging yourself—I’ve seen you do that physically, but I bet you do mentally as well. You like to try new things. Hell, any woman who’s invented a yoga pose is destined for great things.”
I thought it over, trying to see myself as he saw me. I’d always felt I was a fairly ambitious person, but recent events had shaken my confidence. And—wait. “How’d you know about the yoga pose?”
“I—damn. Busted.”
“What?” Alarm bells were going off in my head.
Ford squirmed under my sharp gaze. “I sort of followed you online. Before you came here.”
“What? How’d you even hear about me?”
“From Mac. He mentioned that his daughter had a fitness blog and Instagram and TikTok channels. I checked it out because I’m interested in all that stuff, and I was eager to see how a strong, active woman approached fitness. As you may have noticed, my job mostly involves working with men.”
“Wait, go back a step. How did Mac know?”
“He kept up with what you were doing online from time to time.”
“He did?” That was most definitely news to me. I had no idea he’d kept track of me in any way. “Why didn’t he reach out to me?”
“What would you have done if he had?”
Probably rejected him, if I was being honest with myself. It would’ve been different if he’d kept in touch when we were kids. A new, equally unpleasant thought occurred to me. “So if you were following me, you saw the train wreck that destroyed my livelihood.”
Ford nodded and reached out to cover my hand with his. “I did. And I thought it was extremely unfair.”
It was unfair, but that hadn’t mattered. Once angry online mobs decide you’re guilty of something, they don’t stop to ask questions.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.” It was something I’d tried not to think about. I’d worked so hard to build a following so that I could earn money from my blog and videos. I’d even gotten the sponsorship of a national athletic-wear company.
To me, it seemed like the best of both worlds—I could improve my own fitness while teaching other women how to improve theirs. But then someone had taken exception to that. A woman with a huge following decided that I wasn’t being body positive enough, and that I was promoting a narrow definition of beauty and disregarding the fact that bodies came in all sizes and shapes.
It couldn’t have been further from the truth. In the first place, nothing I posted had anything to do with beauty. It was all about health and fitness and challenging yourself. But it didn’t matter. People piled on. I got hateful messages on every platform. Someone posted my address online and scary mail started coming there. People left screaming messages on my phone. The athletic-wear company dumped me. Overnight, I went from feeling like I was truly helping people to feeling that everyone on the internet hated me.
When I took a step back from those immediate feelings—a big step back—I could see that not everyone online hated me. It was just one of those insta-scandals that sprung up in various corners of the internet. But when it happened to you, it was awful.
Ford was silent, giving me space for my thoughts, which I appreciated. “I know things like that happen online, I just never thought it would happen to me,” I said.