The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 217

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HANNAH’S POV: 

It was Lila. It had to be Lila. She had her phone out when she was in the cafe and I had noticed it and not thought anything of it because people are always on their phones and it had not occurred to me for a single second that she would film me. She seemed so nice. She had good energy and a very genuine laugh. 

She was also, as I now remembered from the tennis court, an influencer with a very large following and apparently a very good eye for what people wanted to see and the forty second video had at this point been viewed somewhere in the region of four point seven million times. 

I stared at the screen. 

“Four point seven million views,” I said out loud. 

“It keeps going up,” Kate said, almost apologetically. “And also.” She took the phone back and pulled up a different screen and turned it toward me again. It showed a search result. At the top, trending, the hashtag read: 

MiradaRises. 

Under it were thousands of posts. People sharing the video. People sharing pictures of my previous collections. People writing long posts about what the Mirada collection had meant to them before the fire, mothers and daughters and women who had seen themselves in the teaser video. A woman in another country entirely had written a very long post about her own mother and ended it with a picture of an old dress in a fabric that looked strikingly like something I would have chosen and tagged it MiradaRises. 

My throat was doing that complicated thing again. 

“Also,” Kate said, and I genuinely did not know if I could handle another also at this point, “Paige posted about her visit today. She has about three hundred thousand followers and the post has been shared about forty thousand times and she tagged you and the warehouse address is not in it but people are. Well. They are finding it. 

“Finding it?” I said slowly. 

As if on cue, the security guard appeared at the door of the warehouse with the expression of a man who needed to deliver news that was neither good nor bad but was definitely something. “Ma’am, there are people outside. Some of them have flowers.” 

I looked at Kate. 

Kate looked at me. 

“Flowers,” I repeated. 

“A few of them have signs,” the guard added. “Very supportive signs. But I wanted to check with you before.” 

I put the rest of the almond thing in my mouth, stood up, put my shoes back on, and went to look. 

There were eleven people outside. That was not a crowd by any definition but eleven people standing outside a converted warehouse in the east end of the city holding flowers and handwritten signs and looking at the building with an expression I could only describe as hopeful was not something I had been prepared for on a Wednesday evening. 

The signs said things like We are waiting for you Mirada and Come back Hannah and one that said, in very large letters, MY MOTHER WORE YOUR BLUE DRESS TO MY GRADUATION AND SHE CRIED, which was quite a lot of information for a sign but I appreciated the commitment to the full story. 

I stood at the entrance and looked at them for a moment and one of the women at the front, who was maybe in her fifties with very kind eyes, saw me and said, “Oh! It is her!” in the way people say it when they are both surprised and entirely unsurprised at the same time. 

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