Ladies' Night, Andrews, Kay [best time to read books .txt] 📗

never quite lived up to its early promise. Apparently the only person in the tightly knit New York design community who was surprised by the move was Woods himself. Insiders tell me Woods is also about to be asked to leave his post as contributing editor at Architectural Digest. Also? We hear Woods’s love interest, boy-about-town Marc Klein has moved out of Nate’s East Village love nest. Stay tuned y’all!

Although the posts on SnarkSauce were usually anonymous, the Nate item was signed. Grace from Gracenotes.

Her fingers flew over the keypad. “I never wrote any such thing. This is all Ben, my soon-to-be ex. You have to believe me, Nathan, I would never, ever write anything like this. Ben has hijacked my blog, and he’s sabotaging me every way he can. I don’t know why he’s decided to do this, but I’m going to get this post taken down, and make SnarkSauce print a retraction. I swear.”

A moment later, she saw that Nathan had replied. His message was succinct. “You are dead to me.”

Grace was devastated. She closed the laptop and put it on the floor, like a diseased thing, best avoided.

18

Grace stormed downstairs to find Rochelle sipping coffee at the bar. “I’m going to kill Ben, so help me. Right after I tear that little bitch J’Aimee limb from limb.”

“What’ve they done now?”

She poured a mug of coffee for herself and plopped onto the barstool next to her mother’s. “I spent hours yesterday making that crab soup, photographing it, editing, then writing and posting my blog. Hours!”

“So? If you’re still fishing for compliments, I’ll say it again. The soup was damned good.”

“The soup was amazing,” Grace cried. “And the photos were amazing. So amazing that Ben lifted the recipe, nearly word for word, and the photos, my photos, and put them on J’Aimee’s blog. And, somehow, he managed to erase my blog post. In its place, he put a link to the foulest, most degrading porn site on the planet. A site that, if you were to click the link, would give your computer a virus.”

“You’re sure it was Ben?” Rochelle asked.

“Who else? It had to be him. I can’t figure out how it’s possible, how he could figure out the password to the new blog, but somehow he did.”

Rochelle rolled her eyes. “What a slimy bastard. It’s a damned shame Ben wasn’t locked in the trunk of that car when you drove it into the pool.”

“And that’s not all he did,” Grace said. “When he was done hijacking my blog post, he hopped all around the Internet, poisoning people against me. He left nasty comments on my friends’ blogs signed with my name, and he wrote this incredibly bitchy piece on SnarkSauce about Nathan Woods and signed my name to that, too.”

“Who’s Nathan Woods? And what’s SnarkSauce?” Rochelle asked. She could never keep all this Internet stuff straight.

“Oh, Mom, you’ve seen his show on Saturday mornings. He’s probably the best-known interior design blogger in the country. His blog has like, I don’t know, probably seven hundred thousand followers. He did a cross-promotion with me back in February, and my analytics took a crazy jump, just because of my exposure on his blog.”

“You still haven’t explained SnarkSauce,” Rochelle reminded her daughter.

“I don’t know if anybody can explain SnarkSauce. I guess you’d say it’s hater central for lifestyle bloggers. People post these vicious remarks about well-known bloggers. I never read it, but Ben always did. He thought it was hilarious. That’s how I know it must have been Ben that wrote that crap. Now Nathan is furious with me. He says I’m dead to him. And all my other blog buddies hate me, too, all because of Ben.”

Grace banged her head on the bar top. “Why me? Why?”

“Did you let these people know it wasn’t you that wrote the stuff? That it was Ben, trying to get even with you?”

“Of course! But I don’t think anybody believes me. People are dropping me from their blog rolls and defriending me on Facebook. At this rate, I won’t have a single friend in the business.” Grace jumped up and paced back and forth in front of the bar, close to tears.

“Grace?” Rochelle’s voice was stern. “Sit down and listen to me.” She caught her daughter by the elbow. “Sit.”

“What?” Grace knew she sounded like a spoiled brat, but she couldn’t help herself.

“Anybody who thinks that you would be capable of doing something like that doesn’t really know you. And if you tell them you didn’t do this stuff, and they still don’t believe you, well, screw ’em. They were never your real friends at all.”

“But they were,” Grace insisted. “You don’t know what the blog world is like. We read each other’s blogs and comment and cross-post and guest blog. And we see each other at meet-ups, once or twice a year. I care about these people, and they care about me.”

Rochelle shook her head. “No, they don’t. Did any of these so-called friends call you after your big breakup with Ben was all over the news? Did any of them drive over here, take you out to lunch, or just give you a shoulder to cry on when you needed it most?”

“That’s not how it works in my world,” Grace said stubbornly.

“Then your world is seriously screwed up. You’ve gone through a lot in the past two months, but as far as I can tell, not a single friend has stepped up. And not just these so-called blogger buddies of yours. Where are your old girlfriends? The couples who used to come to all those dinner parties you used to throw all the time?”

Grace clutched her coffee mug so tightly she thought it might crush. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “A couple left me messages on my phone. But I was just too embarrassed to call them back. After a while…”

“They quit calling,” Rochelle finished her sentence. “Fair-weather friends, every last one of ’em.”

“I guess Ben got custody of all