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Rebecca

I’ve been reading the news and scrolling enough social media to know what everyone is saying about me. Thousands of strangers, maybe hundreds of thousands, are convinced my children are in danger. Because of me.

But they know nothing.

They know nothing about our real lives.

I’d love people to stop and think for a second about what they actually know about my children because they think they know a lot.

They think they know everything.

There have always been haters out there online who are horrified at what I do for work, who scream from the comments sections that I’m a bad mother for exploiting my children’s entire lives straight from the womb. Except no one realizes how little they really know about those six littles.

I’m not an idiot and I’m not a stage mom. I’m building a future for them. I’m ensuring they’ll never depend on handouts or Goodwill or scholarships. I’m doing this all for them because my mother wasn’t able to do it for me.

And I protect them in a way that no one notices.

I only use their middle names, except for Alice.

I didn’t make up that rule until after I’d already written about her.

No one realizes that. I’ve never mentioned their birthdays.

None of their faces are fully visible after their second birthdays but I bet no one has even noticed.

I don’t let them look at the camera, at any cameras in fact.

They’re always turned away. They could be anyone.

They could be child actors. Maybe they’re not even mine.

What does anyone actually know?

Nothing.

Despite how much money I’ve made over the past few years, it took a long time for me to hoard twenty thousand dollars in cash.

All of my influencing payments go directly into different bank accounts that are managed by Olivia’s team and disbursed to run my company.

The ranch also bleeds money and a lot of what I make goes to keeping it up.

Gray’s family money kept us flush for a while, but it began to run out about five years ago.

The Sommers family had plowed through it, no pun intended, believing that money and power last forever.

But oil wells run dry, stock markets crash, and real estate deals go belly-up.

Nothing is a sure thing forever, but when you’ve been rich your entire life you don’t believe that.

A few years ago, Gray started depending on my income more and more, and when that began happening, he kept a careful eye on it.

But my husband did believe that I needed to pay various vendors and employees in cash, the photographers and the nannies.

We also pay most of the farmworkers in cash for seasonal labor.

So over the past year I’ve siphoned off the money I’m using right now.

I didn’t know what I would need it for, I just had the sense that I would need it. That we would need it, the kids and I.

So now we are all off the grid, paying cash for everything. We just aren’t doing it together. My children are safe. They aren’t even very far away. I know that much is true and they will stay safe no matter what happens to me.

I’ve been wearing a long dark wig, sunglasses, and a baseball cap whenever I leave this motel room, but that isn’t often.

I like the anonymity. After being so public for so long, being completely anonymous feels like stepping into a warm bath.

So much so that I wonder if I can ever go back.

I spent last night fantasizing about what it would be like if the kids and I could return to being nobodies, if we could completely step out of the public eye.

It will be impossible now, no matter what ends up happening. Things didn’t go exactly to plan over the past few days. They got messy, horrifically messy. But I can’t think about that now. The only thing to do is move forward.

Even if everything goes right from now on, we will never be nobodies again.

Lizzie found what I needed her to find. I know because I can access my texts and voicemails online even though I’ve kept my phone off so it won’t ping a cell tower.

She’s so good at her job. Lizzie has always been a brilliant reporter.

I don’t know why she doesn’t still report, why she stopped going behind the scenes, off the campaign trails.

I loved her first-person pieces about riding campaign buses and that one story she did on the sex-trafficking ring brought me to tears.

I assume it has to do with becoming a mother. The juggle is real. I know that better than anyone, though I would never show myself dropping a single ball.

It’s been a risk letting Lizzie discover all of this for herself. But one that’s paid off so far. We’ll have to see how today goes. Will she write about what she’s found?

I still ask myself what would have happened if I’d just reached out to Lizzie right after Gray was violent that first time.

If I’d called her straightaway and asked her to come a day sooner, to pick me up from Gray’s place and take me home with her.

What kept me from doing that? It’s hard to access the exact emotion now, but I think it was my stupid pride.

I threw away the most important friendship I’d ever had because I was embarrassed and ashamed, and losing Lizzie in that way, losing the only person who really knew me or cared about me, just yoked me even more to Grayson after that horrific night.

He did everything I asked of him that morning after he hurt me back in San Francisco all those years ago.

I later found out he got the drugs from Marsden.

Mars could get just about anything from his trainers.

Gray told me he explained to everyone at the bakery that we’d gone off on a trip to celebrate.

No one questioned it. No one ever questioned Gray about anything.

I knocked myself out for days and every time I woke up I had a new bandage on my wounds and more food and drugs next to the bed. He took care of everything.

I loved the oblivion those pills gave me.

I loved it too much and maybe Gray knew it because he kept bringing them as I slowly let him in more and more to care for me.

And in that haze of care and healing I started to push it all down into the same black box I’d pushed all the terrible things from my past into.

Once the bruises healed, I finally looked at my phone again. Gray had handled all my incoming messages from work, and no one was any the wiser.

“What do you want to do about Lizzie?” Gray had asked me at one point during my stupor. I’d been so messed up, so out of it, that I’d forgotten she was coming.

“Is she still here?” I’d slurred and mumbled.

“She left days ago. She’s been calling and texting.”

He showed me several of her messages, holding the phone for me.

Fuck you. Seriously.

You know what, I’m done. Don’t call me ever again.

“She’s mad,” I’d managed.

“You told me you didn’t want to see her.”

“I did?”

“Over and over again.”

I had no idea if that was true, but it could have been.

“Delete the messages,” I said. I was high on the pills and still gutted with shame.

That was it. It was almost too easy to erase six years of friendship, but there was no going back.

What I had done was inexcusable. I had invited her to come see me, made her spend her hard-earned money, and then I hid from her like a goddamn coward.

I didn’t deserve her friendship. She was so much better off without me.

That’s what I kept telling myself. And eventually I believed it.

Once I was healed, I spent most of my time in the bakery crafting my signature éclairs. I arrived there well before dawn almost every day.

I’d turn the music up as loud as I could bear and with practiced grace I combined eggs, flour, and butter, each ingredient an essential note.

Whisked vigorously, the batter transformed into a silky sheen, and I could feel the heat of creation coursing through my veins.

The anticipation of the finished product wrapped around me like a warm embrace, igniting a thrill deep within me.

Once the choux pastry was perfectly piped onto the baking sheet, I slipped it into the oven.

The gentle crackling and the rich, buttery scent were the only things that made me truly calm.

I filled each éclair with meticulous care, watching as the creamy custard oozed gently from the ends.

The act of filling them was nearly sensual; my heart raced with the knowledge that I was creating pure joy.

Baking was not merely a craft; it was my heartbeat, my passion, and the ultimate expression of love.

Baking healed me.

Gray apologized every day. He paid to fix my teeth.

Not just the one that had fallen out, but all of the crooked ones that had been a mess for years.

He bought me extravagant presents and eventually he did whisk me away on a surprise vacation to Hawaii, a place I had only ever seen in movies and magazines, and it was there that I began to soften to him again.

He gave me all the safety and security I had always craved. He made life feel easy.

The bakery did well until it didn’t. San Francisco was such a fickle city.

They loved you one day and forgot you the next.

Business eventually dwindled when some other shop across town began making some hybrid of an éclair, a cannoli, and a croissant that became all the rage on Facebook.

An ecolissant. It sounded like an infectious disease, but it looked divine in pictures.

Then an Au Bon Pain opened next door and just sold the cheap version of both our stuff.

But it only made me try harder, work harder and longer. Gray hated it, but he never laid a hand on me again. Nor did he have a single sip of alcohol. He was on his very best behavior. So much so that the memories of that night eventually stopped haunting my dreams.