Page 5 of A Home for Harmony

“Do I want to know what your sponsors are?” he asked.

Her smile filled the interior. “You should see your face,” she said. “Nothing scandalous. I’d never dothat. I sort of fell into things from my last job at Media Creator. I was a content creator and would be crazy not to ride it and bank the money, but it’s not like I think it’s going to last. A lot of my sponsors are clothing brands.” She pulled at her leggings. “These for one. I love yoga and talk about it, so it made sense. Skincare products. Jewelry. Things like that. I’m very choosey what I accept. I have to believe in the product and what the company stands for.”

He’d give her credit for that.

He noticed she had a daisy flower ring on her middle finger and rose earrings in her ears. His daughter had those same earrings.

“That’s good,” he said.

“You’re not impressed,” she said. “And I don’t expect you to be. I get looked down on for my career choices. I’ve got a legitimate business and clients all over the world. I’m not riding the influencer rage and thinking it’s going to last me a lifetime.”

“It’s not for me to be impressed, like, or dislike what you do,” he said.

“I know,” she said, smiling. “I’m just saying that everyone has to do what makes them happy in life. If they don’t like it, they need to take steps to get there. That’s what I’m doing. I do whatmakes me happy and post that also. Just like what happened to me this morning willnotbe posted.”

“Because you don’t want followers to know that everything isn’t always perfect?”

She laughed. “They know it’s not because I say things like that. But this is private. I’m very careful about what I put out there. This doesn’t mean I don’t share things that happen, but joking about going outside in bad weather, my car dying, my improper attire, and now sitting in a police car would be very irresponsible.”

“You’ve got a point,” he said. “But that doesn’t stop many people from still posting.”

“It’s not me unless I turn it into a lesson for others,” she said. Her phone went off. “Oh, they will be here in five minutes to get my car.”

He told himself he should feel relieved—but the truth was, he didn’t. Not even close.

2

PRIME AGED SIZZLING

“Ican’t believe you didn’t call me,” Erica said when Harmony climbed into her sister’s car thirty minutes later.

“I sent you a text,” she argued.

“You know I don’t look at texts when I’m in a meeting,” Erica said. “But if my phone rang, I would have checked it.”

She knew that, but didn’t want to put her sister out. “It worked out fine.”

“I was only meeting with Tucker’s HR department,” Erica said. “I could have left.”

Tucker, her sister’s boyfriend, owned a massive manufacturing plant in the area. He and her sister had met through her old job, and Harmony still found it funny that all three of them had somehow ended up back in Mystic.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I was lucky the state police stopped to check on me. He was nice enough to let me sit in his SUV with him while we waited.”

There was no way she was admitting to her sister that her heart was wildly racing that she thought it was going to springout of her chest and take off on a run slip sliding in the snow and ice.

No one knew that she’d been getting disturbing emails and messages for over a year.

Heck, she thought they’d finally stopped five months ago.

Every message she got, she blocked. The same with the emails.

But they kept coming under a new name every few weeks. The same tone of messages too. She knew it was the same person and couldn’t wait to get out of the city.

With her not being in New York City, they couldn’t make comments about where she was or what she was wearing, seeing her out to eat with friends or coworkers. Nothing.

At first she’d thought it was comments on how she looked in her videos that she posted. Some of them were.

But then she realized that outfits or places they mentioned weren’t in videos or posts and someone was actually watching her.