Re: [Orchard: Bea & Holly]
When he said he wasn't legally dead, Bea's face went blank with shock. "That's crazy." It was a denial, but it wasn't a real one, it was just something her mouth said through her surprise. They couldn't do that, could they? Tell her one thing when it wasn't true. The only reason they would do that was if Holly really was alive, and not dead, and they'd wanted to conceal it from her. But she would have found out, eventually. What if some day she'd wanted to marry again? Or if the baby had lived, then what?
They'd have just let me go on, a little voice in her head supplied. And why not? She wasn't anything to these people, whoever 'they' were. Anger flared in her dark eyes again. Nobody got to treat her like that. "I'll make a stink, you can bet," she promised, showing her small teeth. "There will be lawyers for days. And my emotional distress is going to have a lot of zeroes. You have to get these people where it hurts, Holly. Dollars and rep."
They stopped. Bea's Echo-people shifted, multicolor silhouettes en masse. The river definitely flowed in one direction, for the most part. She huffed out a breath, but turned, not ocmmenting, just moving away, the way they had come.
She tossed her hair. At least she didn't feel like crying any second now. "Yeah, I'm pissed. Noah was my friend. Not yours. Mine. If I didn't already know you were trash, Holly." But she didn't say it with anger now. Fatigue. "Ugh. What a mess. We gotta think about how to go public with this. I need to get it up on Insta. Something emotional, real."