Lizzie

“Come to a secret dinner,” she whispers in my ear.

I turn my head to look behind me, but the woman is standing directly in the sun, and I can’t make out who she is at first. My eyes stare at the perfectly tanned and toned legs that seem to go on and on and then the modest but stylish one-piece bathing suit in blue gingham.

Finally, the halo of blue-black hair rippling in the wind comes into focus.

Veronica Smith in the flesh.

She’s here.

The article I wrote for Modern Woman about Bex and what she’s been through got the most traffic of anything we’ve published in two years. There’s no way Alana is letting me out of here. And after what I’ve seen and my talk with Olivia, I’m committed. I’m in.

This time I wrote the truth as best I could. Occasionally my own emotions got the best of me, and I had to rein them in. We published both of the photographs, the old and the new. Obviously, we couldn’t say that it was Grayson who hurt Bex. I have no proof, but I also have no doubt.

The Internet is deeply divided over the photos.

There’s currently a Save Barefoot Mama campaign running, complete with memes and GIFs.

No one is clear on what exactly Bex can still be saved from.

The damage has been done. Grayson Sommers is dead.

The same “citizen journalists” who castigated her only twenty-four hours earlier are now desperate to get to the bottom of the abuse.

They’re trying Gray Sommers in absentia, combing through a decade of visuals on Bex’s accounts looking for more evidence.

They claim they see a bruise here, a scratch there.

One believes they have cracked a secret code within her captions where Bex was consistently crying out for help.

There’s a second camp too, one filled with defenders of Grayson. They claim the images are doctored; that Bex is a delusional narcissist, desperate for attention; that she probably hurt herself just to make Grayson look bad.

The cops called me this morning. They want to talk and now I think I need a lawyer so I told them I’d be there tomorrow morning with our Modern Woman attorney on conference call.

I may also ask Olivia to join me. I touched base with Peter to check on the kids and was reassured but also slightly put out that everyone seemed to be faring so well without me.

For the next couple of hours, I’m letting myself soak in the good life.

It would be a travesty for a lovely pool to go to waste, even given the circumstances.

Yes, everything that’s happened in the past five days has been horrific.

But frankly it’s also the first vacation I’ve been on without kids in years and even with all the drama it’s still easier than keeping my kids from pooping in the pool before drowning.

I braved the precarious swinging rope bridge this morning with my laptop in tow and I’ve been working from a chaise on the mesa for a few hours.

I could get used to this, though I miss Peter and the kids.

I haven’t sat alone by a pool since our honeymoon.

As soon as I got myself settled, a waiter brought me a complimentary papaya smoothie.

Just because. A cool towel scented with eucalyptus was draped on the back of my neck.

Every so often someone appeared to ask what I needed, what would make me more comfortable, how could I feel more zen.

After years of ignoring my own needs, being cared for feels like the ultimate gift.

I’m typing away with my earbuds in, munching on lightly buttered zucchini flowers, when I hear the sultry whisper. For the past twenty-four hours I’ve pored over all of Smith’s media channels.

Knowing she could also be working with Olivia has made her even more interesting to me.

And if she truly was having an affair with Gray that could be my next story.

In fact, she could also very well be a suspect in this case.

If he hurt Bex maybe he hurt her too. Or maybe she wanted revenge because he refused to leave Bex.

Maybe she has nothing to do with this at all, but it’s something to pursue while I have no other leads.

And reading about her is addictive anyway.

So is watching her. I can’t stop. Like Bex, she has “it,” even if the content of her videos isn’t necessarily my cup of tea.

She’s sweet as pie one minute and militant and controlling the next.

She’s a drill sergeant dressed like a picnic table.

She’s obsessed with carrot-and-stick parenting, a form of discipline that seems to border on abuse, but her audience adores it.

They want to know everything about her life and her parenting techniques for her four boys—Jaxon, Callum, Finn, and Revy.

They want a constant rundown of her days, and most of all, they want to know how to land a man like Marsden.

Her voice from all the videos now rings in my ears. She lives in my brain.

“Hey, guys, and welcome back to my channel! Today, I’m going to be giving some tips for the ladies on how to attract a masculine man—a provider man,” she says in one clip.

“Thank god I didn’t waste my twenties chasing career success and instead devoted them to raising babies and caring for my man. My life is truly filled with purpose,” she insists in another.

“Let me tell you the six habits that turn my momming game up to eleven. I rise before the sun is up. I work out hard daily and do it first thing in the morning. Working out gives me vibrant energy that coffee cannot re-create and puts me in a positive headspace with my kids. Every supermama needs a superpower. Endorphins are mine,” she explained as she tried to sell me a workbook to better organize my entire life called Mom So Hard .

One video rolled into the next and into the next.

Before I knew it, I’d lost two hours and I desperately wanted to be the kind of woman who could wake up at five in the morning and do burpees.

I had to genuinely admire her dedication to running her household with the iron fist of a Fortune 500 CEO.

I admittedly run mine more like an illegal day care overseen by Oompa Loompas.

“Excuse me?” I say to Veronica now, popping out an earbud.

“Come to dinner tonight? A few of us have organized something. Since the conference isn’t really happening anymore we decided to make the most of the time. I’m Veronica, by the way. We met in the lobby on the first day.”

“I remember,” I say, and sit up properly. When I do, she sits down next to my legs, perching beside me like we’re old friends.

“My family owns this place, you know.”

“The Sensoria?”

“Yup. Always has. I learned to swim in that pool and got potty trained in one of the suites.” She laughs at the silliness of it.

“I thought it used to belong to a Spanish countess.” I remember the fact from my tour when I arrived.

“My great-grandmother,” she says. “And then it went to her son and then my dad. But he died without a boy. Only three daughters, heaven forbid, so what happens next with the property is totally up in the air. It’ll probably go to one of our husbands.”

“Can’t it just go to you?”

“Probably not.”

“That’s annoying.”

She shrugs as if to say, Of course it’s annoying, but it’s also a fact of life and how dare I question it.

“So, what do you say? Secret dinner.” She drops her voice conspiratorially and rubs her palms together as she says secret and then delivers a husky laugh.

“I guess. When? Where?”

“All excellent questions.” She crosses her legs and tips her face up to the sun. “We’re setting it up at sunset out in the desert. Over there.” She gestures toward the expanse. “Behind Devil’s Staircase. Invite only.”

“Devil’s Staircase?”

“That rock formation. Look at the horizon, slightly to the left. The rock that looks like a spiral staircase. Do you see it?”

I squint into the distance and can sort of make it out.

“Why Devil’s Staircase? It looks like it’s going up. Wouldn’t the devil be…you know…in the other direction?” As if I’m some sort of scriptural expert.

“It also goes down. Straight down into the gorge on the other side. Straight into hell.” She says this with a wide smile. I remember her vacant expression from Marsden’s statement about Gray. The way he squeezed her leg. In person she’s the opposite of that stiff woman. She’s electric.

“So I just walk out into the desert and look for a table or something?”

“Be on the patio at five. We have dune buggies.”

“Can I write about it?”

“Not about the dinner. It’s a safe space for everyone, but I’m dying to get you next to me at dinner. I’d love to talk to you about some things.”

“I’ll see you at five.”

“Looking forward to it.” She gives a beauty queen wave and sashays away. She’s even more of an enigma than Olivia Jackson.

***

I study the other women waiting for the dune buggies to take us out to the ominous Devil’s Staircase. What had I expected? All women like Veronica? All of the tradwives? This mix is more eclectic than that. Every single variety of influencer is present. Trads, Hens, Fitness, Bosses.

I see the pregnant panelist who had been onstage that first day, @B0ssBabe$$$.

Her real name is Amy Weisberg, according to her badge, which everyone is still inexplicably wearing.

I vaguely remember what she said on the stage: “I am a multi-hyphenate human who goes with the flows of the moon to show up authentically for myself and my community.” I wonder if she always speaks in code, and I sidle up to her and introduce myself.

“When do you head home?” she asks.

“Soon,” I say vaguely.

“It feels like we’re all trapped. Stuck here while we wait for flights back.”