There was my profile complete with a photograph of me in my studio kitchen—wearing a peasant blouse and strategically distressed jeans, my blond hair swept off my face in a loose bun.
@SunshineCooks
Cooking for a New Generation. Host of #alittlesunshine. NY Times bestselling Author: #afarmersdaughter, #farmtothenewyorktable & (coming soon!) #sunkissed
And a new tweet to my 2.7 million followers.
Apparently from me.
I’m a fraud. #aintnosunshine
I must have let out a gasp, because Danny turned. “What?”
“I think I was hacked,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
He walked back over to the bed to see for himself. I quickly pulled the phone away. Even in the chaos, I still had an instinct to control it, keep it close. And, of course, to keep it away from him.
“You know what? It’s nothing.”
“Sunny . . .”
“Danny, I’m forwarding it to Ryan now. He’ll deal with it. It’s his job.”
Danny looked unconvinced. Fourteen years. He knew things. “Are you sure?”
I forced a smile and repeated that all was well. So he nodded, walked away.
First, though, he leaned down to kiss me. A sweet kiss. A birthday kiss. Not the sex that we’d been close to, but something. Something lovely.
Which was when the phone’s bright light shined again, another tweet coming in.
Let me stop there, though.
Before we got the next tweet, the next hack, before we got to what it said. The thing that led to the demise of my career, my home, my marriage.
You remember how I told you that there were two things you should know right up front?
The first was how it happened. On the morning of my thirty-fifth birthday, “Moonlight Mile” welcomed me to my day, my husband still loved me, and then the email came in. The start of something I couldn’t stop.
The second thing you should know? I was not (certainly at that moment in time) a good person. Some would even say I was a bad person. And everything this emailer—the hacker, the imploder of my perfect life—had to say about me was the truth.
See how I told you how it happened first? Garnering sympathy. Take that as proof of the second.
2
I sat in my living room, my laptop open in front of me, tweet number two burning up.
Luckily, Danny had a consultation for a project on Central Park West so it wasn’t hard to get him out of the apartment quickly, leaving me alone to sit there in my egg chair—a mid-century purple swivel seat that I purchased for too much money shortly after A Little Sunshine was picked up to series. I normally loved sitting in my chair. I was oddly attached to it, considering it was as ugly as it had been pricey. Though, at that moment, even my favorite chair was giving me hives. Well, it probably wasn’t the chair. It probably was the tweets.
To elucidate on the “I’m a fraud thing,” here’s Exhibit 1: #aintnosumshine
And there was a photograph. It was a photograph of a splashy tear sheet from my first cookbook—A Little Sunshine: Recipes from a Farmer’s Daughter. A tear sheet with my signature recipe. Tomato pie. A modern take on the Southern classic: a cracker-thin crust strewn with juicy heirloom tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, fresh basil, pine nuts, and layers of creamy mozzarella cheese. It had garden fresh herbs, cracked pepper, and my trademark: citrus in place of salt.
Except my name was crossed out on the top and, in thick black marker, the name Meredith Landy was written instead.
Meredith Landy was my executive producer Ryan’s wife. She was a former sous-chef at Babbo who had long ago traded in her thankless restaurant hours to move to Scarsdale, where she spent too many hours redesigning her thousand-square-foot home kitchen—first to mirror Diane Keaton’s kitchen in Something’s Gotta Give, then to mirror Ina Garten’s barn-kitchen.