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“Yeah, exactly,” she scoffed. “Anyway, ENT took care of those ones. I sent them the links, and they dealt with the rest.”

“Holy hell, Becka,” I breathed.

“Now, don’t go looking at me all moon-eyed, Ky. None of this was a big deal. I just sent some emails. I got Dad to write a strongly worded letter and I just forwarded it a bunch of times. Anyway, none of this is my pièce de résistance,” she said grandly, sweeping the papers aside like they were inconsequential, and not evidence of how hard she’d worked.

“Let me show you something,” she said with a gleeful expression, reaching forward to grab her laptop. She tapped away at the keys, and then turned the screen around for me to see.

404. Page not found, or has been removed.

“May I have a shred of context?” I raised my eyes back to Becka.

“Look at the address,” she said, practically vibrating.

I leaned forward, squinting to make it out.

“The Tabs? You got her website taken down?” I gasped.

“What? Like it’s hard?” Becka grinned, giving me her best Elle Woods hair flip.

“I’m gonna kiss you,” I said seriously. “C’mere, I’m gonna kiss you right on the mouth.”

Becka squealed and pushed herself across the floor, skidding on the papers, and howling as I grabbed her ankle to pull her back towards me.

“Let go of me,” she cackled as I peppered her face with kisses, before pushing me off. “There’s more!” she gasped, laughing.

I let her go immediately. “How?” I demanded. “How can there be more? Have you slept at all?”

Becka waved a dismissive hand. “Here, and there. Anyway, look at this.”

She pulled her laptop towards her again, and brought up a spreadsheet. It had several columns that weren’t immediately obvious to me. Some were red, but most were green. I leaned forward to read the tiny boxes.

“Hey,” I said as recognition dawned. “Those are my publications.”

Becka had a long list of all the papers or sites I’d worked for.

“You knew I’d reached out to them,” she said reasonably. “But I thought you’d like to see what that actually meant. Click on the links in the blue boxes.”

Eyes wide, and throat suddenly too-tight, I clicked on the top one. Frequency.

The K-Pop Idol and the Journalist:

Two people fell in love. So why is she the face of the scandal?

My hand fluttered over my mouth as the page loaded, showing a photo of me, following behind the group backstage – working, essentially – and a photo of Jihoon looking back at me. I’d never seen this one before, and maybe in another context the image wouldn’t have much to say, but in the context of this article, it was loud.

I closed the page, and clicked on another link from Becka’s spreadsheet from the website THV.

Who does an Idol’s private life really belong to? When the cost of the ‘availability fantasy’ disproportionately affects the women, when is it too much?

I skimmed the article briefly. It referenced me and Joon heavily, but the broader focus was the unfair way women were often put in the centre of scandals, even when there were two people involved.

I tried another link – this time from The Loop.

How the internet put a scarlet letter on a woman for loving someone they decided belonged to them. Kaiya Thompson isn’t the first. And why she probably won’t be the last.

I couldn’t look at any more. I pushed the laptop away, swallowing thickly.

“There’s more,” Becka said gently. “You should see the emails I got from them. Babes, they all replied. Every single one. Some can’t publish anything for various, valid reasons, but most have, or have agreed to. Kaiya, you’re not alone.”