I wondered what it must feel like. Not to step into the fantasy, but to step out of it, to leave it behind at the end of the day and return to your unfiltered reality.

“We of course make small changes for every guest, so nothing is exactly the same. And we can book you on a monthly rotation so that you can shoot all your content once a month and be done with it. Where do you live?”

I didn’t have words for what I was seeing.

All those kitchens that I had coveted during hours of watching reels and stories on social media.

No one owned them. Or someone did, but not the women in the videos.

They were probably owned by some private equity firm based in the Cayman Islands, snatching up properties at auction and flipping them with new crown molding and posters that read, Grateful .

Bex of course has enough money that she doesn’t have to go the hourly rental route, but maybe she has the premium version.

Maybe this is her soundstage. Maybe her real kitchen, her real dining room, her real TV room (if she has a TV, which she claims she never lets her children watch), are somewhere else.

I feel like Alice searching Wonderland for a hidden door.

There is another key on this key chain. There’s somewhere else Bex wants me to look.

I walk down the hallway away from the pristine sitting room.

The first door opens easily. It’s a bathroom.

The second is a closet with all the standard hall closet things in it, kids’ raincoats, umbrellas, shoes, hats.

It’s slightly more disordered than the rest of the house that I’ve seen and that fact gives me hope.

The door at the end of the hallway is locked.

As I turn the key in the lock I wonder, for about the tenth time, why Bex is leading me on this wild goose chase instead of just calling me and telling me her side of the story. Wouldn’t that be so much easier than all this subterfuge?

Maybe she knows me better than I think she does, knows my need to uncover things for myself, to report out a situation, to discover the proof rather than have it told to me.

I suddenly remember a conversation we had in college when I worked for the student newspaper. I was reporting out a story about the new restaurants opening up on the fringe of campus.

“Can’t you just google them?” Bex had asked, irritated that I was missing a date party with Phi Delt to visit two of them.

“I could. But that’s not the same. I want to talk to people in them. I want to meet the owners, taste the food, smell the smells. I need to see it all.”

The same thing is true now. I need to see her life for myself.

She also must know that I don’t trust her, not after all this time and all these years of silence. If she called right now and laid out her side of this story it would never be enough.

I open the door.

The hallway continues on the other side, practically a mirror image of what I’ve just seen except the sloppy and lived-in version of it.

I almost giggle with joy. Here there are sneakers on the floor and greasy little handprints on the white walls.

I step on a Lego and smile. Thank god. None of it is real.

This is her real life. This is all of our real lives.

Every mother’s life is coated in shit and Legos. It’s so goddamn validating.

It’s also proof that Rebecca’s whole brand is a lie.

But is that the right way of saying it? Aren’t all celebrity brands manufactured?

Bill Cosby pretended to be America’s perfect dad for a generation.

Ellen DeGeneres cosplayed as America’s best friend.

Apparently Dean Martin pretended to be a drunk even though he didn’t like to drink because it made male fans like him more.

What celebrity out there is actually portraying themselves on any screen?

If I’ve learned anything over the past few days at MomBomb it’s that these influencers are the next generation of celebrities and they’re all working from a script.

I keep walking. Family pictures adorn the walls, the frames crooked, probably from getting knocked by flailing arms, lacrosse sticks, and soccer balls.

There’s another kitchen at the end of the hallway.

It’s nice and the appliances are high end, shiny, and clearly new, but it’s normal-level cluttered, with actual things on the countertops like bottles of vitamins, a pill organizer, sandwich bags, water bottles.

A tangle of device chargers is plugged into one of the outlets and a small notepad has a checklist of groceries that need to be ordered.

Have the police been back here? Did they also obtain a key to this shadow house? I imagine they’ve already searched the entire property. Yet, I see no signs of police activity, or that anything has been disturbed since Bex left to go to the conference.

Where the fuck are her kids? I wonder over and over again.

It doesn’t look like they took off in a hurry and I can’t see any signs of a struggle.

It’s everyday normal-person cluttered in here, but not someone-just-kidnapped-six-people messy.

I make my way up a set of stairs into another part of the house that I’ve never seen on Bex’s Instagram.

I peek behind every door. Mostly kids’ rooms, one with cribs, one with a bunk bed.

The shadow house must have other kid rooms that aren’t actually slept in.

Toys and books have been left out in these rooms. Inside one is a Casio keyboard and a double bed perfect for a twelve-year-old.

This one must be Alice’s room. That’s the only one I walk into.

There are unicorn stuffies on the bed, American Girl dolls primly lined up on the shelves, and framed pictures on the dresser.

Alice holding one of her baby siblings, Alice and Bex in matching dresses.

Alice on a stage at a piano recital. Gray isn’t in any of these pictures.

I had long wondered if he was the one taking them, all of the Bex photos and videos and all of the home-birth shots.

Now I know that was probably relegated to a professional photographer or videographer whose job was to make it look like everything was shot in the moment.

I pick up the image of Bex and Alice. Their arms are wrapped around each other, and their smiles are wide.

Nothing about it looks or feels staged. There’s a genuine love there. I know it.

Bex would not put her kids in danger. Maybe that’s one of the things she wants me to see here, to feel here.

I put the photo down and move on. At the end of this hallway is Bex and Grayson’s bedroom.

It’s neater than the kids’ rooms, but still not perfect.

The bed is made, which doesn’t surprise me.

Bex has always been a religious bed maker, even in college, when no one made their loft beds for an entire semester.

There’s a fancy Peloton even though I know there’s a complete home gym elsewhere on the property.

I’ve seen videos of Gray and Bex working out together in there.

At one point she sold a course on couples’ core tightening.

A chair in the corner has clothes thrown on top of it just like every other chair in every other bedroom all over the world.

I look at it all carefully, the wide-plank oak floors, the overabundance of throw pillows on the bed.

This is probably her most personal space in the house.

But I also have no idea what I’m searching for.

I open the top drawer of her dresser and find your standard lingerie drawer.

Everything in here is nude colored and exactly the same.

Same flesh-colored bras and briefs. All of them utilitarian looking, which makes sense for life on a farm, but also reminds me that Bex was the person who first introduced me to what she referred to as “butt floss” in college.

She once bought me a variety pack of thongs in every color of the rainbow.

I still had one left until I had Ollie. The floss snapped unceremoniously the last time I tried to put it on.

I don’t want to rummage through her underwear.

That seems a step beyond. In the back of the drawer, I see a small pearly pink case that I recognize from a similar one inside my own underwear drawer.

A teeny-tiny discreet vibrator that I was convinced to buy on Instagram with an ad that gussied up masturbation as self-care.

I wonder if Bex was influenced by the same one.

Can an influencer still be influenced? I shut the drawer and turn to face the bed.

Those were my instructions. Next to the bed .

As I drift toward it, I hear a door creak open downstairs.

Shit. I pause and listen hard because maybe I was mistaken about the sound, but no, there’s a loud slam and heavy footsteps.

Could be the cops, could be a farmworker.

Could be anyone, really. Am I the only one Bex has left notes and keys for?

Is this all some kind of sick scavenger hunt?

I glance one more time at the bedside table as I try to figure out where to go. The book on it. It’s so familiar. Damn it! It’s mine. It’s the book I gave her! I know it is.