Ladies' Night (18 page)

The photo was the exact one Grace had posted on her own blog, but with the headline Grab Some Crab.

Beneath it was Grace’s corn-crab chowder, which J’Aimee (or more likely Ben, Grace decided) had rechristened Crab-Corn Bisque. She’d cleverly changed the recipe in the slightest ways, calling for a sprig of rosemary instead of tarragon and decreasing the amount of half-and-half. But otherwise, it was Grace’s recipe. And it was definitely Grace’s photo.

“Oh, hell no!” Grace exclaimed. She scrolled down to see the number of comments J’Aimee’s post had garnered. There were seventy-six, and it was barely 7:30
A.M.
on a Sunday, usually her slowest day for blog traffic.

She quickly typed in a comment of her own. “THIS RECIPE AND PHOTO WERE HIJACKED FROM TrueGrace.com. To see the original, much better, recipe, click over to here.” And she added a link to her own blog.

Most likely, Ben, whom she assumed was the blog’s administrator, would delete Grace’s comment and block her from trying to comment again, but Grace didn’t care.

She opened her own blog. Nothing. Her new banner was there, but the only thing beneath it was a vaguely worded link. She instinctively clicked on it, and immediately regretted it. The link took her to the vilest, most sickening display of pornography she could have imagined.

Grace stared at the screen in stunned silence. How? She didn’t have to ask who had done this, who’d not just erased her blog post, but sabotaged her entire blog. It was Ben, that she knew. She just didn’t know how.

How could he have infiltrated her blog? She had a new protected password; he couldn’t have accessed it, or could he?

Fuming, she left the blog and went to check her e-mail. Her in-box showed she had eighty-eight new messages.

She read the first one, from another lifestyle blogger, Shana, of Design or Die, and cringed.

Grace, what’s going on with you? Your blog has been hacked, and it’s not only got a porn link, it’s infecting anybody who opens it with a virus. Love ya, girl, but for the sake of my readers, I’m removing you from my blogroll until you get your act together.

The next e-mail was from Nathan Woods, an influential interior design blogger with nearly half a million followers. Grace had been on cloud nine the day Nate had e-mailed to tell her how much he loved her post “Window Treatments That Ought to be Outlawed,” which he’d privately called “Swags for Hags.” He’d done two cross-promotions with Grace that had gained her a slew of new followers, and had even given her invaluable business advice about which advertisers to avoid on her own blog.

Nathan’s e-mail was terse and to the point.

What the fuck is this???
It was followed by a link, which took her to an infamous online forum called SnarkSauce, where contributers posted venomous items about Internet celebrities.

I HATE NATE was the post’s headline.

Closet queen Nathan Woods’s tenuous hold on the title of “Biggest Boozer” has never been challenged, but recently the Manhattan-based designer and blogger was knocked down a rung when textile giant F. Shumacher & Company ended their five-year contract with Woods, whose lame-ass line of botanical-based fabrics 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 our old friends.” Grace blinked back tears, and wondered if her tear ducts would ever dry up. “And that hurts, too. I try to keep busy, to keep from dwelling on everything, but everyday, it’s like something else happens, another slap in the face. My blog? I know it seems silly to you, but, Mom, this is my work. If I don’t have a marriage, and I don’t have any friends, and then, somehow, I can’t even make a living, what the hell else do I have? What kind of life is this?”

Rochelle handed her a paper towel. “Dry your eyes, honey. This is the life you’ve got, so put on your big-girl panties and make it what you want it to be. All your old friends are gone? Find some new ones. Ben’s attacking you. Counterattack. Stay on the offensive. The best way to do that, from where I’m sitting, is to figure out a way to do what only you can do, and then get on with it. Everything else will take care of itself.”

“How?” Grace’s voice quivered with emotion.

Rochelle threw up her hands in surrender. “I don’t know, Grace. I’m not Dr. Phil. But you can’t just give up and sit around and whine. That’s not how we raised you.”

She leaned closer to Grace, rested her forehead against her daughter’s. “Figure out what you want. And then go get it.”

*   *   *

She hadn’t had all that much contact with the Gracenotes advertisers. That had been Ben’s department. But she’d had some correspondence with the bigger, most important ones: Home Depot, Levolor, Benjamin Moore, Viking, a big carpet manufacturer, and DeWalt, a power tool manufacturer.

Now Grace scrolled through the contacts on her laptop, searching them out, mentally composing the message she’d send.

Dear Sir: Just wanted to take the time to thank you for your past support of Gracenotes. Unfortunately, a situation has arisen that I wanted to make you aware of. I am currently in the middle of an unpleasant split from my husband, Ben. The result is that although Gracenotes.com is still online, I am no longer authoring or associated with those posts. I’ve started a new blog, TrueGrace.com, and I hope you’ll take a look at it. In the meantime, you should know that Ben is actually lifting my intellectual property—my writing, my recipes, and my photographs—and publishing them on Gracenotes, representing them as original. I also believe he’s actually engaging in sabotaging my career as a blogger, by posting potentially libelous, scurrilous, negative comments and material on other lifestyle blogs and signing my name to them. I know your company values your brand and identity too much to underwrite these kinds of activities, and I hope you will take the appropriate steps to ensure that your company is not associated with individuals who rely on devious, underhanded, negative activities. All best, Grace Davenport (formerly Stanton), the True Grace.

She pushed the
SEND
button and, for the first time in weeks, felt like herself. The real Grace.

19

Grace had never been what you would call athletic. She’d been a book nerd as a kid, always happier inside with a book than outside with a racket or a club or playing a sport that made her sweaty.

It was only after her sophomore year of college, when she’d gained not just the freshman fifteen but a whole twenty pounds, that she’d reluctantly taken up running. She’d kept it up, off and on, since then. Running to keep her weight down or the stress of daily life at bay.

Lately, she’d started running for sanity. Since the split with Ben and moving into the apartment above the Sandbox, she’d taken to waking before dawn. Sometimes she read; sometimes she worked on her blog; sometimes she laced up her running shoes and hit the road.

Reading again through all the e-mails in her in-box left her feeling infuriated and helpless, even a day later. Ben—or somebody—had done a thorough job of poisoning her Internet presence. Using her name, he’d posted inflammatory blog comments on every single blog from her old blog roll. She knew this because nearly all of the bloggers had e-mailed to tell her that she was dead to them, too.

She had to get away. It was still dark when she slipped down the stairs and let herself out the Sandbox’s side door.

Grace wasn’t fast, and her running form left much to be desired. She popped her earbuds in, pressed the
PLAY
button on her iPod, and loped down the street. The route she’d developed took her along the winding roads that paralleled the Gulf of Mexico. If she looked to her left, she could see blue skies, sometimes catch patches of blue-green surf through the tree line of shaggy Australian pines and palm trees.

After crossing the bridge from Cortez, she ran through Bradenton Beach, on to Holmes, and Anna Maria. After an hour, her nylon tank top was drenched with sweat, her gym shorts plastered to her butt. Even her ponytail dripped sweat onto her shoulders.

The last mile of her run was actually more of a cool-down walk. She did a run-walk on the beach for a half mile or so, keeping her eyes on the surf line, scanning for any shells, watching the seagulls and sandpipers. At one point, she stopped and stared at a huge gray heron, poised, motionless at water’s edge. The bird never flinched as Grace approached and stood, marveling at its elegant blue-gray plumage. Eventually, she moved on, but the heron did not.