We all know that nothing ever really disappears from the Internet. How many times have we seen a deleted tweet in a screenshot retweeted over and over and over again? TikTok creators regularly make reaction videos to comments. If there’s a nasty comment and you go to the original video to see what it was about, the comment has usually been deleted, but it is forever attached to the new video.

I have always instilled in Corinne the need to be mindful of what she posts on social media. The other side of it is to not put yourself in a position that someone else could post something negative about you. Plenty of celebrities have been “cancelled” in recent years for things they said or did sometimes decades ago. So I always fall back to something my mom told us: Don’t do or say anything that you would be embarrassed to see on the front page of the newspaper. Nowadays, there aren’t as many front pages in print, but you get the idea.

And a lot of kids think they’re “safe” because apps like Snapchat delete their stories after 24 hours, not thinking about their friends who take screenshots or the fact that Snapchat sends them memories a year or two later. Clearly the stories aren’t really being deleted.

The teenager who sends a risqué photo to a current boyfriend or girlfriend. They don’t think about what happens to that photo when they break up and the other person wants to embarrass them and shares it with someone else…who then shares it with someone else. I can think of one ironically named politician who ended up resigning after he tweeted and deleted a photo, only to have it discovered that he had been sending risqué photos to several women, some of whom were minors. He tried to claim he was hacked at first but eventually admitted the truth.

As I tell Corinne often, be careful what you say and do. Be super careful about what you post online. That stuff never goes away, and it can always come back to bite you in the you-know-what. 🍑

---

Book Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐
4 Stars for The Personal Assistant by Kimberly Belle

352 pages
Publisher: Park Row Books
Publication Date: November 29, 2022
The Creepy Book Club selection for January 2023, purchased on Amazon.

Publisher’s Description

When Alex first began posting unscripted family moments and motivational messages online, she had no intention of becoming an influencer. Overnight it seemed she’d amassed a huge following, and her hobby became a full-time job—one that was impossible to manage without her sharp-as-a-tack personal assistant, AC.

But all the good-will of her followers turns toxic when one controversial post goes viral in the worst possible way. Alex reaches out to AC for damage control, but her assistant has gone silent. This young woman Alex trusted with all her secrets, who had access to her personal information and front row seats to the pressure points in her marriage and family life, is now missing and the police are looking to Alex and her husband for answers. As Alex digs into AC’s identity—and a woman is found murdered—she’ll find the greatest threat isn’t online, but in her own living room.

Written in alternating perspectives between Alex, her husband, and the mysterious AC, this juicy cat and mouse story will keep you guessing till the very end.

************

Main Characters:

• Alex – late 30s, social media influencer known as @UnapologeticallyAlex, pushes positivity and women supporting women, she has just surpassed one million followers when the story begins; has been married to Patrick for six years
• Patrick – mid-40s, Alex’s husband, self-made millionaire, hosts an investment segment on a local news station
• Penelope and Gigi – Alex’s twin 12-year-old girls from her first marriage
• Shannon – 20 years old, junior in college majoring in digital marketing, the neighbor’s nanny and Alex’s former intern
• AC – Alex’s personal assistant hired about six months prior, always seems to be tension between her and Patrick, Alex describes her as a millennial who always knows what to do when it comes to social media
• Anna Claire – housekeeper at a small-town motel in a previous timeline; prefers to be called AC (may or may not be the AC mentioned above)

I couldn’t get enough of this book. I took off one star because there are plot points that just don’t quite connect and the ending didn’t seem believable for me. I definitely recommend the book though, so if you don’t want spoilers, skip to the link to buy it when you get to the Spoilers section. 😉 You can always come back and read the spoilers afterward and tell me if I missed something. I will seek out this author again.

For context, I started reading this on a Monday in a week that I ended up working about 55 hours in spite of taking off half the day on Friday because I had to take my daughter to urgent care. I finished it early Saturday morning…got up to let the dog out around 6 and decided to read instead of going back to sleep. Suffice it to say, I skipped out on quite a bit of sleep to keep reading because I really wanted to figure out how current timeline AC and earlier timeline Anna Claire/AC were connected to one another as well as how they were connected to Patrick.

At the beginning of the Prologue, we meet Anna Claire, who goes by AC and finds herself being rescued by a wealthy mystery man when her car breaks down. Chapter One introduces us to Alex, who is waking up with a hangover from the celebration she had the previous evening when her social media account @UnapologeticallyAlex hit one million followers. Known for her uplifting posts meant to empower women, Alex discovers with Patrick’s help that her three-paragraph post from the previous evening has racked up 175,000 views. The Internet trolls denounce Alex as a fraud for calling an actress an attention-seeking slut and a two-bit whore…among other things.

The problem is that Alex doesn’t remember posting. She has a strict rule about not posting while she’s drinking, and nothing goes live without AC’s double and triple check. And AC is suddenly missing, so she has to have had something to do with the post, right? The impact hits Patrick at the TV station and the twins at school. Someone is clearly out to get them, and we find out when Patrick’s chapters come around that he is definitely keeping secrets about his past with AC.

Throughout the rest of the book, narration cycles between Alex, Patrick, and Anna Claire. I had plenty of theories because the author does a great job of throwing suspicion in a lot of different directions. Alex tries to get to the bottom of everything while Patrick desperately tries to hide his past. And I love that the book doesn’t have a nice, clean, happily-ever-after ending.

***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***

From the beginning, I assumed (incorrectly) that Anna Claire in the Prologue is AC in the rest of the book. I also assumed (incorrectly) that the wealthy man who rescues Anna Claire is Patrick. I suspect that’s by design. He calls himself an investor, and he’s travelling for work. The way he rescues Anna Claire seems similar to the way Patrick rescues Alex at a valet stand, which is how they originally met. Anna Claire mentions that the man is about 20 years older than she is, and we know that Patrick was “pushing 40” when he met and married Alex six years prior.

The leap I took from here is that Anna Claire is in her early 20s, which would jive with Alex’s description of her being a millennial who always knows what to do on social media. (Ironically, Alex herself is a millennial.) My theories drifted back and forth between AC being a scorned former lover who Patrick ghosted when he met Alex because he talks about how immediately he fell for her when he saw her at the valet stand. The other possibility is that Patrick cheated on Alex with AC and then dumped her. Either way, AC wants revenge. Patrick keeps trying to figure out how AC found him, so clearly he has a past with her, and he doesn’t tell Alex that he knows her. He just acts like he doesn’t like her, and Alex doesn’t really know why.

But it’s Patrick’s past with AC that doesn’t fit because AC is not Anna Claire. She’s Anna Claire’s daughter, who Patrick wrapped up and left for someone to find when she was a baby and he was a college student, which would mean the real AC would be about Patrick’s age. Once we find this out, we know that Patrick is not the wealthy man in Anna Claire’s chapters because that man was much older than Anna Claire.

It also doesn’t explain how Patrick knows that she has anything to do with his past, unless it’s just the fact that she calls herself AC and that she reveals something to him that readers aren’t privy to. This piece is never explained. And the resolution of the past involves a drug cartel, the murder and disposal of the body of a drug lord who wants the money back that Anna Claire hid, and the assumption is that Patrick has it. But in 25 years, with Patrick being in a high-visibility position, a drug cartel never found him to reclaim their $2 million? If AC the adopted orphan can find him, surely a powerful drug cartel can too.

And the final piece…AC doesn’t make the viral post that starts the whole firestorm. Penelope does because the twins just want @UnapologeticallyAlex to go away. So the fact that AC just happens to go MIA after the post feels a little too convenient.

---

If you enjoyed this post, please comment below. Subscribe for regular updates, and share it with your friends. If you’re interested in starting a conversation, send an email to booksundertheblanket@gmail.com.

^{As an Amazon affiliate, I earn a small commission at no cost to you when you make a purchase using the links on my site.}