Work Text:
Concussions sucked. No two ways about it.
“Ah, ah, ah, no.”
Hope knew it was childish, but she still protested as Klaus snatched the phone out of her hand. “Dad, it’s been a week, I can—”
“No screens.” Klaus tucked her phone into his own pocket and continued walking on to the kitchen. Hope had thought he would be distracted by a business call long enough for her to at least text friends. Apparently her father had super senses or something.
“Mom lets me have screentime,” she said, flopping backward on the couch.
“Would you like me to comment on the other myriad reasons I find your mother to be a foolish woman? Because you’ve explicitly asked me not to before.”
Hope considered sticking her tongue out at him. “I’m twenty-four.”
“Mm, yes, I recall.” Klaus checked the fridge.
“At some point, I really am able to take care of myself, I promise.”
“But we’re having so much fun.” Klaus pulled out the takeout leftovers from the night before.
There was no way she was going to win this one, so Hope propped her feet up on the arm of the couch and stared at the ceiling. She’d been doing a lot of that this week. Clan Mikaelson and Hayley had descended on her hardcore after her accident on the soccer field. She didn’t need this many minders, even if it had been great to see Keelin and rough house with toddler Nik. Their absolute refusal to let her watch TV, spend more than a few minutes on her phone, or do anything that required a lot of thinking was seriously getting to her.
She had a channel that was being severely neglected. Even if—she’d sneaked a peek—the last video, one of Klaus sitting on her couch and addressing her twitch chat, was racking up tons of views. He’d appeared on her channel before, but never by himself. And for over an hour, he’d charmed and multiplied her audience by answering questions and mocking the viewers in equal part. Hope had stayed off-screen, helping him with any technical problems and hiding the incredibly ugly goose egg on her forehead under a knitted cap the few times she’d shown up on camera.
“I’ll be filling in for my daughter while she’s on hiatus,” Klaus had told the chat, and things had gone absolutely crazy from there. “I will not say why she’s on hiatus, and I am authorizing the moderators to delete any questions about it. She will be back shortly.”
Two minutes before, he hadn’t even known what moderators were.
And now here he was overstaying his welcome, even though he flew out every other day to catch up with the band. Usually he brought various aunts or uncles back with him, but today seemed dedicated to solo father-daughter time.
“Ten minutes of checking my phone is not going to set back my recovery, Dad,” she said, glaring up at the ceiling. “I’ll lower the brightness way down.”
“Your heartfelt pleas are acknowledged,” Klaus said, dishing food onto plates to be reheated. “And denied. Why not try Mozart? I’m told that’s good for developing mental states.”
“Again: not a toddler.”
Concussions could go suck on a tailpipe, Hope decided, folding her arms over her chest. For the past week, she’d gotten unholy amounts of sleep, and it still hadn’t made a dent in the dragging exhaustion that tugged at every limb. More than once, she’d trailed off mid-sentence while talking to somebody, and had had no idea she’d even been speaking in the first place. The first few hours after the concussion were a blur. She remembered being taken to the hospital, she remembered the twins showing up. And Josie and warmth and intense relief. But beyond that, not much. She’d woken up in her own bed, drooling into her pillow with Josie asleep on the other side of the mattress. But Josie had had to leave after breakfast, and ever since it had been a revolving door of Mikaelsons.
Something was wrong, she felt, but she couldn’t remember what.
Klaus pulled her phone out of his pocket and checked the screen. “Ah, one of Caroline’s delightful daughters is calling you. I will allow you this provided it is returned immediately.”
Hope rolled her eyes to cover the fact that her heart leaped. Boredom really must be taking a toll on her; she usually hated talking on the phone. Even if it was Josie.
It wasn’t: Lizzie’s profile pic filled her screen.
“Hello?” Hope said.
“We have a problem.”
“Hi to you, too. No, I’m feeling much better, really. Thank you for asking. How are you?”
“Oh, right. Concussion. That’s what started this all. You’re good?”
“Yes. Little surprised to be hearing from you, though, I will admit,” Hope said.
“Well, if you answered a single one of my DMs…”
“I’m not allowed screens right now. Stalin Mikaelson over here is being super militant over it.”
“Stalin was his last name, dear,” Klaus called from the kitchen.
On the other end of the phone, there was a pause. “So you haven’t been online at all? You haven’t seen it?”
Hope pinched the bridge of her nose. “What part of ‘no screens’ and ‘dictator dad’ and ‘concussion recovery’ was unclear?”
“Hey, don’t get snippy with me. We need to work together to solve this.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What are we solving?”
“Josie blew off a maybe-date with Senorita Steroids to take care of you after your concussion, and said fitness youtuber did not take it well. She’s been smearing your name left and right ever since. And dragging Josie into this mess.”
“Wait, who?” Hope sat up.
“Finch. Keep up.”
Hope’s head began to ache as she struggled to put it all together. Of all the times for her brain not to participate. She vaguely recalled Josie mentioning somebody named Finch. And she’d seen them sending each other messages on social media that she liked to think of as “Schrodinger’s flirting.” The flirting probably was alive, but could just as easily be denied. It had been nice to see Josie having a good time, even if maybe Hope had gotten vibes from Finch.
Apparently she’d been more on the money than she knew. But that wasn’t the important part.
“She blew off a date to take care of me?” Hope asked, trying to piece it all together. “She didn’t need to do that—”
“It’s already said and done. We’re dealing with fallout now, not the cause.”
“Let Finch talk about me all she wants. I don’t actually care.”
She didn’t even have to imagine Lizzie rolling her eyes. The action came through her tone of voice loud and clear. “I know you don’t. Josie, however, does. And it’s making her unhappy, but I already panda-promised her not to intervene. You, however, have not.”
“What do you even want me to do?” Hope asked.
“Fix it, obviously.”
“How can I, if I don’t even know what’s going on? And I can’t research it, either. No screens, remember?”
Another pause on the other end of the phone. She could hear Lizzie’s evil little brain whirring. “I’ve got an idea. I’ll put together an explainer.”
“A what—”
“Are you going to be home this afternoon?”
“I guess?”
“Good.”
Lizzie ended the call, leaving Hope staring at the phone in bafflement—until Klaus plucked it from her fingers.
“She seems nice,” he said, setting Hope’s food on the coffee table. “Trouble in online paradise?”
“Yeah. Yeah, something like that.” Hope grimaced and rubbed her temples. Somebody had started online beef with Josie? Why? She was so likeable. Only fans of Penelope Park ever disliked her, and that seemed more performative than anything else. Josie, having started her channel with Lizzie years before, had a really thick skin for online discourse. Or Discourse, as it deserved its own capital letter. So this had to be something big. What had Finch even said to upset her so much?
“You’re thinking too much, little wolf,” Klaus said. “Finish your lunch and then a nap is in order.”
“Not a toddler, Dad,” Hope said for what felt like the thousandth time. Though a nap sounded ideal, and she hated that for herself.
She tucked into her lunch, trying not to die of curiosity about what Lizzie had planned for her.
An actual dossier.
In an actual manila envelope. Delivered by bike messenger. Hope, newly awake and anticipating Lizzie descending on her like a whirlwind at any moment, was utterly perplexed as she held a packet of physical paper in her hands. On the front of the packet was a post-it: “Guaranteed concussion friendly. – L”
She thumbed to the first page in the elevator back to her apartment. In giant font, Lizzie had written: OPERATION SPINUS TRISTIS.
The next page was just a picture of a goldfinch with a big red X over it.
“That’s a bit much,” Hope said, blinking. “Wait, this isn’t a kill order, is it? Lizzie, what have you gotten me into?”
She let herself back into her apartment. Her father had left to catch a flight, but not before extracting a promise that she would keep her phone and computer powered down unless it was an emergency. Hope had anticipated having to break her word, but trust Lizzie Saltzman to come up with an analog alternative.
She set the packet on the kitchen island, cast one sad look at her liquor cabinet, and opted for the too-expensive fizzy water her father had bought. “Time to embrace the insanity, I suppose,” she said with a sigh, and turned the page.
Lizzie had included a table of contents. The first section was a dedicated overall timeline—thoughtful—section two was a list of core cast, three was the inciting incident, fourth was fallout reactions, and so on. And everything was in size thirty-six font.
“I can still read small text,” Hope said in exasperation. No wonder this packet was so thick, when only a few sentences could fit on a page. A peek at the core cast showed her photos of herself, Josie, and Finch. Below that, smaller and like an afterthought, was a picture of Josie’s ex, Penelope. Lizzie had selected a photo of Finch in boxing gloves, staring down the camera.
“That’s…aggressive,” Hope said, flipping back to the timeline to start. She prayed this wouldn’t give her a headache.
It started two weeks prior, with Finch’s channel making an announcement that Josie would be doing a big collab with her on the night of Hope’s accident. Lizzie noted that the event had been promoted by both Josie and Finch, with playful back-and-forth between her sister and the traitor—Lizzie’s words, not hers. Clearly this would not be an unbiased dossier, though, to be fair, the red X over the bird on the cover had given that away already.
The date of her accident was broken into hour chunks, some of which were illustrated. Hope personally found the drawing of her holding a soccer ball and with Xs for eyes to be a bit much. She skimmed past a detailed breakdown of arrivals and departures to and from the hospital, then frowned and went back. Finch apparently had reached out to Josie and Lizzie via DM to find out where Josie, a clear no-show, was. Lizzie had responded. Josie hadn’t.
That seemed out of character.
Twenty minutes after that: “Finch begins livestream and makes inciting comments. See Section 4 for transcript and associated screenshots.”
Eight minutes later: “Tweets begin. See Section 4 for more detail.”
“Oh, no,” Hope said.
An hour later: “Josie contacts sister with news of being blocked by Finch. Wishes sister well on date. She’s a good egg.”
“Little condescending, but true,” Hope said. Though she was dying to flip ahead and read the transcripts, she forced herself to keep going through the timeline. For two days, nothing was listed by tweets, some given more importance than others, and then: “Finch does Insta Q&A live. All attempts to smooth over situation add kerosene to fire instead. Josie eats an entire pint of Phish Food by herself, insists she is fine. She is clearly not. See Section 4 for transcripts.”
“I’m starting to think I should just go straight to Section 4,” Hope said. Why she was speaking aloud so much when this was the first alone time she’d truly had in over a week, she didn’t know. She took a sip of water and continued on.
What followed was a few more days of tweets, until an entry from the day before: “Penelope Park enters the arena. She shall be referred to as Satan from now on. Tweet attached in Section 4.”
Postmarked twenty minutes after that was another section: “Satan clarifies to several followers that her ‘jealous much?’ subtweet has nothing to do with Finch, and wishes Josie well of that mess. No reply as of yet from Josie OR Finch. All-out war ensues between factions calling themselves ‘hosies’ and ‘finsies’ and ‘posies.’ The author requires a drink. Go read the transcripts, Hope.”
She officially had a headache, Hope decided. She turned to Section 4.
The first transcript was from Finch’s livestream:
“Like, for example, today. Somebody promised to be here. I won’t be saying her name, but you’ve all seen the schedule, you know who it is. And she ditched me. Again. For the same person. Now, I know I’m just a simple meathead but maybe don’t string others along if you’re going to ignore them for someone else. That’s twice now you’ve dropped plans and run straight to this woman. You’re kind of obvious about it. And maybe if you’re going to ditch me? At least do me the courtesy of texting to let me know. Here I was, convinced that you were lying in a ditch somewhere and I had to hear about it from your sister? It’s just—god.”
Hope sat back. Finch had said that live? Had the woman lost it? Hope’s own rise to fame, such as it were, had happened unexpectedly when an old story time art stream had gone viral. She’d had to learn basically overnight about how to exist in the public forum that was Internet Hell. And she’d taken to heart was when to keep her damned mouth shut and when she needed to talk about something. It was why she wasn’t planning on being open about her concussion until she felt better. Fielding all the questions and well wishes would drain her battery faster than anything else.
Rule one: if you were truly mad about something, stew a bit but keep it offline until you had time to be reasonable.
And “running straight to this woman?” What was Finch even talking about? Twice didn’t seem like that much. Hope was tempted to break her word to her father and text Lizzie, to ask if Finch had thought the relationship was more serious than it was. She was acting like a spurned lover, rather than somebody who’d been ditched for a single live session.
It continued on in that vein, with Finch venting her spleen for pages about how she’d noticed people were getting more unreliable with age. The next page featured tweets in which speculation ran rampant. Somebody shared the schedule for the week, taken from Finch’s discord, so they needed no time figuring out she was ranting about Josie. But who’s the mystery woman?? became a common thread, with users split on the vote at first between Hope and Penelope.
Until somebody else pointed out that Penelope was doing a live on another platform, with Josie nowhere in sight. And Hope hadn’t posted in hours.
In truth, those messages didn’t bother Hope. People enjoyed pairing up minor celebrities on the internet, often based on as little as a single shared look. The number of times she’d been asked if she was dating so and so was truly astronomical. And there was a small, devout army of people who believed she belonged with Josie, down to sleuthing out the most minor interactions and drafting entire novels of meta about them. Hope accepted this as part of being online, sure. And she considered her duty to ignore all of that.
The messages that made her blood begin to heat were much nastier: direct attacks on Josie for betraying their favorite. They liked to post out-of-context screencaps of Josie mid-word (never a great look for any streamer) and mock her for pouting too much. And they responded to every single unrelated post Josie made for a couple of days with these accusations, no doubt flooding her mentions.
Assholes. Hope turned the page. Her own accounts hadn’t been left unsullied, either, but she’d muted all notifications as part of her hiatus. And it looked like having Klaus on her channel had drawn way more attention than this subset of creeps.
Transcript of Finch’s Q&A followed:
Q: Are you still mad at Josie for missing the stream?
A: Yeah, I’m over it. It’s really no big deal. Sometimes you think a person is somebody they’re not, it happens.
“Somehow,” Hope muttered, “I sincerely doubt my current impressions about you are wrong.” She took a long swig of water and read on.
Q: Who did Josie abandon you 4? Ppl think its Hope Mikelson [sic].
A: I plead the fifth. But they sure do a lot of collabs, don’t they? I’d begin examining my priorities at some point. Just a piece of advice.
She was stirring her fans up. Deliberately. Sending them to make Josie’s life awful like a fucking heat seeking missile of misery. Hope stared at the words. Just a piece of advice. Just a piece of advice. Just. A. Piece. Of. Advice.
She didn’t want to turn the page. She knew what she’d find. Because apparently unlike Finch, she hadn’t been born fucking yesterday.
Hope shoved away from the kitchen island and stormed to the punching bag in the corner. Pulse pounding, she drew back—and her eyes landed on the post-it note right at eye level. “No. Concussion, remember? Love you, Dad.”
She let out a small scream. It wasn’t her proudest moment.
If draining her anger through physical activity was out, then she’d turn to the next best outlet: her sketchbook. Hope whirled and stomped into her art studio, aiming for her stack of half-finished sketchpads on the shelf. She had no idea what she would actually draw, but her entire body itched to do something with all of this fury. Josie had gone out of her way to help Hope out and had received nothing but vitriol for it. Guilt only made the fury burn brighter, like a sick, twisting lump in her chest, choking her up.
She turned to grab her charcoals, then looked up. Right at the blank wall. The rest of her studio was set up to her liking, with her new pieces on the wall alongside her old, and the lights and cameras nicely in place. But that wall, which was in front of her whenever she sat at her computer to stream, taunted her with its emptiness.
And as she stared at it now, an idea began to form. Finally, something she could do that didn’t require screens, extremely strenuous physical activity, or deep thought. “Sorry, Dad,” she said, pulling up a rideshare app on her phone and grabbing her keys. For this, she would need the hardware store.
As she left her apartment, she hit a number in her contacts. “Hey, Wade, are you available for an emergency editing session? I can pay double.”
“I don’t understand why you needed my help,” Wade said twenty-seven hours later. “This required minimal editing.”
Hope, sitting on the floor in the middle of her studio in exhaustion, merely made a noise in acknowledgment. Every fiber in her being felt absolutely wrung out, tempered only by a sweet sense of vindication. “I’m still technically recovering from a concussion. Can’t look at screens for too long..”
“And you thought painting an entire wall was an acceptable substitute? Okay. Sure.” She heard typing in the background. “It’s ready to post, and I’ve filled in all the metadata. Have you given it a title?”
“Just a piece of advice,” Hope said.
“What?”
“That’s the title. ‘Just a piece of advice.’”
A long pause on the other end of the phone. “Sure thing. Summary?”
“Credit the original account, my socials, the usual.”
“No problem.” More typing. “Hey, ah, Hope? Are you sure this is a good idea?”
Finch had hurt Josie. “Yes.”
“It just seems a bit…”
“Yes?”
“Overkill. There, I said it. Sorry! Sorry, but it’s how I feel.”
“Wade, just post the video.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thank you. Call me back if there’s any trouble.” Hope hung up and lay down on the carpet. She thought she’d heard Wade mutter that there would absolutely be trouble, but she opted to ignore it. Usually after posting a video she went and hit the punching bag awhile to avoid frantically refreshing her stats page. Now she felt only the dual tugs of satisfaction and weariness that came with the end of an all-consuming project.
Her viewers, she knew, would click on the new video, but they wouldn’t find her normal fare. Usually her videos tended to be her narrating or chatting while working on a piece of digital art. This time, she’d decided not to speak at all, instead starting with a silent shot of her turning on a wide-shot camera at a low angle in front of the wall, then turning to set up her supplies. And then a timelapse montage of her painting that wall the exact shade of blue of Twitter’s old dark mode. Luckily, it wasn’t a large wall, but it had taken her time trimming in the top and using a paint roller to fill in the rest.
And in a rectangle in the center of the wall, Hope had painstakingly stenciled in the words “I am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me?” in the correct font. She’d referred back to Lizzie’s dossier to insert the date of Finch’s initial livestream in the date slot. She would say that was what she was proudest of, except that wasn’t it. No, that honor belonged to the profile pic. Instead of the screaming robin from the original birdrightsactivist account, she’d painted a pristine yellow goldfinch in loving detail in exactly the same pose. Screaming and annoying.
One of her finest achievements, really.
Hope had ended the video by painting the final stroke and turning to sit cross-legged in front of the wide-shot camera, staring directly into the lens with her chin propped on her fist and the mural on display behind her for a full twenty seconds before she turned off the camera.
Was it her finest project? No. Some of her brush strokes on the goldfinch were a little sloppy. But it sure as hell was the most satisfying.
Without the focus of The Work to keep her occupied, her mind began to drift. Every thought suddenly began to feel slippery, turning into mere wisps whenever she turned her attention on it. She’d had a sense that something was wrong from the night of her accident, something besides her gracefully head-bonking another soccer player. But it threaded in and out of the memory-less abyss of the night Josie had taken care of her, before her father showed up and after the hospital. And frustratingly, none of it seemed to stick around long enough for her to comprehend it.
Could all of this somehow be attached to that? She wanted to mull it over, but it felt too far away.
So instead she poked at a bruise in her mind that had arisen while she painted the wall. Josie had kept this to herself all week, opting to deal with it alone. Well, she had Lizzie. But Hope was directly involved in this, and Josie hadn’t reached out to even talk to her about it. The rational part of Hope knew that it was just Josie trying to shield her from the backlash while she recovered. And the even more realistic part of her knew it had been a kindness on Josie’s part.
The irrational side of her, the one that had been on the verge of a temper tantrum at not being able to do anything but rest and play board games and listen to music all week, hated that. She actually wanted to…what? Challenge Finch to a duel like they were gentlemen in an Austen period piece? Like Josie was some fair maiden they were fighting for the hand of? Hope found the idea kind of absurd, but Josie would probably be into that kind of thing. She’d never admit that, but she also had a framed copy of the Disney Princess Challenge drawing Hope had done of her as Jo White.
Her phone began to chirp. Hope set it to Do Not Disturb.
Maybe not a duel. Maybe a fistfight, or she could put Finch in a headlock and force her to apologize to Josie. Both acceptable solutions. Hope rolled over and stood up. If she couldn’t actually do any of those things—stupid concussion—then she’d at least draw them and make herself feel better. She picked up a sketchpad she hadn’t used in a couple of months, not since she’d moved into the apartment, and began flipping through.
She stopped on a forgotten page, her fingertips trailing across the drawing.
It was a rough sketch, unrefined, of Josie in her empty studio on the day they’d first visited the apartment together. Hope had turned the page to sketch in ideas about a bookshelf or something unimportant. But Josie had answered a call from her sister, distracting her. Her soft smile had been so magnetic. Hope’s fingers had started sketching without time for her brain to catch up. Josie, sitting in the middle of the room in a bright patch of sunlight from the window, one long leg crossed over and leaning back on one hand while she talked on the phone. She had her hair swung over one shoulder. Hope hadn’t drawn herself into the picture because she hated self-portraits, but now a small piece of her soul wished she had. Just to capture that she’d been there, too, in Josie’s circle of existence.
God, her smile…
Hope’s head snapped up so fast that her brain protested.
She blew out a long breath through her nose to find her center, and the world fell away from her anyway.
She loved Josie.
And she probably had for a long time. Not just physical attraction, though obviously that was there, but something deeper. When had that even happened? Had it been gradual? Had it been in the background all along, ambling just outside of her notice? Or was it recent?
But god, there were signs. Freya had asked her who to call after the concussion, when none of her family could make it, and only one name had come up. Even though any of her streaming buddies would have dropped everything just like Josie had. Their messages and jokes online made her happy, but not like seeing a notification about Josie pop up anywhere, really. She loved and missed the random silly texts of cute animals and memes that Josie usually had to explain the next time they saw each other. And Josie’s smile and Josie’s laugh and Josie’s…everything.
Hope slowly turned and surveyed the mural covering an entire wall of her studio now. “Huh,” she said aloud. “Well, this explains some things.”
What else was there to do after the epiphany that she was in love with her best friend, but go directly to sleep? Well, Hope imagined there was plenty she could do. Like tell said best friend. Or even send a message or two just to test the waters. But she’d pushed her body so far beyond its limits painting that mural that she crashed hard, facedown on her mattress, before she could even begin to explore any of it. It might had been early evening, but injury recovery demanded its own timeline.
So Hope slept the sleep of the dead and absolutely did not think about what to do next. She did wake up to her phone buzzing, though. Blearily, she put it on speaker. “Hope’s phone, may I ask who’s calling?”
“I told you to fix it, not start World War Three!”
“Good morning to you, too,” Hope said, feeling around until she found her spare pillow. She hugged it to her middle. “You didn’t like my solution?”
“You call that a solution?” Lizzie asked.
“No, I call it art. But it can serve more than one purpose,” Hope said. She squinted at the sunlight coming through her window, which mercifully didn’t hurt as much this morning. “What time is it?”
“I should have broken the panda-promise and dealt with it myself,” Lizzie said. “If I’d known you were bringing a tactical nuke to a knife fight, I would have!”
“And here I thought I was being subtle,” Hope said, unable to stop the smile. Her head felt remarkably lighter this morning. It was going to be a good day.
It only grew better when Lizzie let out an aggravated noise and hung up on her. Hope put her head back down. She hadn’t even gotten to tell Lizzie how impressed she’d been by the dossier. She’d text her later. As for right now, she herself needed to change out of her painting clothes and deal with the rumbling stomach.
But that could wait for more sleep. Just five minutes or so.
“It’s eight thirty,” said a voice from behind her. “Since Lizzie didn’t answer you.”
Hope twisted her entire body like a cat and tilted her head to look at her visitor. Her smile grew. “Good morning.”
Josie glared right back at her. “Don’t you dare smile at me like that. It is not a good morning. I’m mad at you.”
“What’d I do?”
“Don’t play innocent either, oh my god. It’s beneath you.” Josie folded her arms, pushing her shoulders back to look a little taller. She stayed like that, glowering, until Hope bit her lip to hide her smile. Only then did Josie jerk her head toward the kitchen. “Breakfast is ready.”
“Be there in a few,” Hope said, and Josie stalked away. Really, if her heart leaped like that every time she saw Josie, she truly was an idiot for taking this long to realize it. Perhaps she spent a couple minutes longer in the bathroom than necessary, trying to smooth her hair down where it was particularly unruly, but she figured Josie wouldn’t notice. She changed out of the paint-stained clothing and strolled into the kitchen.
“You know, I’m getting real mixed messages here. You’re mad at me and yet you cooked me—ooh, bacon.” She snatched a piece from the plate.
“This is not a reward for good behavior.” Josie wouldn’t look at her as she carried glasses of orange juice over to the kitchen island. “This is me making sure my friend—who should be resting and not painting entire walls—gets an actual meal. I watched that video. You didn’t eat yesterday, did you?”
“Of course I did. I think.”
“Hope…” Josie closed her eyes on a very clear prayer for patience. “Eat your omelet. And your bacon that I cooked for you even though it’s gross.”
“You put kale in this, didn’t you?” Hope said, pulling a face.
“Spinach. Eat.”
Hope obeyed. After days of takeout from her father and her mother’s middle-of-the-line cooking, the omelet tasted amazing, even with the added spinach and mushrooms. Neither of which came from Hope’s kitchen.
“So has she seen it?” Hope asked between bites.
“Yes.”
“And her reaction?”
Josie stared down at her own omelet. “It wasn’t happy. Apparently she was midstream, and somebody sent it to her.”
She couldn’t have timed that better, Hope decided. “Good.”
Josie sighed and pulled something from underneath the egg carton. She slapped Lizzie’s dossier in front of Hope. “I found this on the floor when I went to look at the mural. Did either you even consider that I was choosing to stay out of it and avoid getting down on her level?”
“I don’t think I got on her level,” Hope said thoughtfully. “I think I dragged her down a few.”
“I’d say that’s accurate. I just wanted it to blow over.”
Hope put her fork down. “Josie, she deliberately sic’d her fans of you. We weren’t going to let that fly.”
“You defending my ‘honor’ could have made it much worse!”
“Did it?” She genuinely didn’t know. She hadn’t looked at her phone. Being offline for a week had its perks.
Josie’s lower lip stuck out in a slight pout. “No.”
“So it’s helped?”
“You got lucky the internet adores petty bullshit above all else.”
“She started it,” Hope said.
Josie gestured wearily at her: congratulations on making my point.
Fair, Hope thought, crunching into her bacon. She studied Josie for a minute, just enjoying this. Sitting down for a simple breakfast with a woman she clearly adored. And one she liked to think she knew pretty well. “You’re not really mad at me.”
“I want to be mad at you.” Josie finally gave in and shook her head. Her smile felt like a benediction. “But no. I’m not. It was boneheaded, but sweet.”
“My middle names,” Hope said.
“And clever, as much as I don’t want to admit that for fear of stoking your ego. What even gave you the idea?”
“Where do any of my ideas come from? I don’t know. I was just reading that—” Hope nodded at the dossier “—and getting pissed at all the BS she put you through over, what, being off the grid for ninety minutes? What if you’d dropped your phone in the toilet or something? Or you were stuck on a subway? Way to overreact.”
“We don’t have a subway,” Josie said.
“The point stands. She sucks.”
“Can’t actually argue with that. We’ve blocked each other, so I think that particular nightmare’s done and over with it.” Josie fiddled with the edge of the folder. “You know, next time, if you’re that pissed, you could just try calling me and discussing it like a rational adult.”
“And miss a chance to be petty?”
“The smugness is not cute, no matter what anybody tells you. I really should’ve known better than to try and date another streamer. First Penelope, then this.” Josie wrinkled her nose at the folder.
“Hey, don’t give up on all of us,” Hope said.
Josie turned her head and gave her a puzzled look. “Us?”
“I mean, like, in general,” Hope clarified, realizing she’d spoken a little too hastily. “Jed, for example. Jed’s great.”
“I’m not going to date Jed,” Josie said, sounding confused.
“I wasn’t saying you should. Just saying he’s great.”
“This is a very weird conversation.” Josie stood up to take her plate to the sink, flicking Hope on the shoulder on the way by. “You should count your lucky stars that all the Mikaelsons seem to be internet illiterate and don’t know anything about your little mural stunt.”
“That’s good—wait. How do you know that?”
“There’s a ‘Minding Hope Group Chat.’”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s just a few of us. Freya added me. I offered to check in on you since,” Josie pulled up her phone to check, “your mom’s in New Orleans, your dad’s in Detroit, and Freya and Keelin have a date night tonight. Also I volunteered you to watch Nik for that, so they’ll be dropping him off at six.”
Hope had absolutely no idea how to process the fact that Josie was apparently in a group chat with several members of her family—without her. Between this and her epiphany the night before, she’d lost all track of solid ground. So she shook her head muzzily, and asked the only thing that came to mind: “Are you at least going to help me with Nik?”
“I’ll consider it.”
As revenge for the little birdsrightsactivist mural stunt went, it was mild: Hope dearly loved her little cousin and didn’t mind watching him while her aunts had a night off. But she could acknowledge that it was revenge. Josie might not be outright angry at what she’d done, but she also wasn’t entirely thrilled.
She decided to focus on more important matters. “So no dating streamers at all, huh?”
“None,” Josie said, rinsing off her plate. “The events of the past week are enough to make me swear off them forever. The next person I date will hopefully never even have heard of YouTube.”
Hope waited until she was all the way down the hall and out of earshot before she combed her fingers through her hair and gathered it in a bunch at the nape of her neck, blinking quickly as she came to terms with it. Josie, no longer dating streamers. Right as Hope figured out things for herself.
Well, shit. What was she supposed to do now?