© 2009

The jackals swarmed her as she stepped out into the late April afternoon. When Georgie had ducked into the perfume shop on Beverly Boulevard, only three of them had been stalking her, but now there were fifteen-twenty-maybe more-a howling, feral pack loose in L.A., cameras unsheathed, ready to rip the last bit of flesh from her bones.

Their strobes blinded her. She told herself she could handle whatever they threw at her. Hadn’t she been doing exactly that for the past year? They began to shout their rude questions-too many questions, too fast, too loud, words running together until nothing made sense. One of them shoved something in her hands-a tabloid-and screamed into her ear. “This just hit the stands, Georgie. What do you have to say?”

Georgie automatically glanced down, and there on the front page of Flash was a sonogram of a baby. Lance and Jade’s baby. The baby that should have been hers.

All the blood rushed from her head. The strobes fired, the cameras snapped, and the back of her hand flew to her mouth. After so many months of holding it together, she lost her way, and her eyes flooded with tears.

The cameras caught everything-the hand at her mouth, the tears in her eyes. She’d finally given the jackals what they’d spent the past year preying to capture-photographs of funny, thirty-one-year-old Georgie York with her life shattered around her.