I didn’t recognize the sender’s email address. So I almost didn’t open it. I like to tell myself that if I hadn’t, I could have stopped everything that came next.
Door one: Sunshine Mackenzie ignores the email, has birthday sex with her husband, and life goes on as usual. Door two: Sunshine pushes her husband aside and opens an email from someone called Aintnosunshine, and life as she knows it ends.
Let’s guess which door I took.
Do you know who this is? Here’s a hint: I’m about to ruin you.
I laughed, a little loudly. After all, it was such a ridiculous email. So incredibly over-the-top, like the spam you get from Nigeria asking you to send your bank account information.
“What’s so funny?” Danny said.
I shook my head. “Nothing. Just a silly email.”
“They usually are.”
This was a point of friction between us. Whereas my entire career existed online, Danny was an architect and sometimes didn’t even check his email more than a couple times a day. He’d learned how to contain it, disregarding ridiculous emails from difficult clients, who were obsessed with their Gramercy Park brownstones, their Bowery rooftops. He’d learned how to contain it, so he could get the work done for them. It was a skill that his wife, apparently, had yet to learn.
I turned back to my phone.
“All right. You’ve chosen,” he said.
Then he pulled the blankets back, got out of bed.
“No!” I said. And I reached to pull him back down. “Danny! Please come back. That’s a birthday order.”
He laughed. “Nope, too late.”
Then the next email came in.
Do you think I was kidding? I’m not the kidding type.
Some would even say humorless: www.twitter.com/sunshinecooks
This stopped me cold. Why did he choose the word humorless? (At that moment in time, knowing nothing, I thought the hacker was a he.) It was a specific word. It was also a word I used often.
So I clicked on the link.
And there was my verified Twitter account staring back at me.
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.
She was also, as I thought only two other people in the world knew, the recipe’s actual creator. Two to 2.7 million in the blink of an eye. I had to fight to keep my balance.
“I’m trying to get Twitter on the phone!”
I turned in my chair as Violet, my assistant, walked into the apartment, carrying two Starbucks coffees, her cell phone glued to her ear.
“Fucking West Coast hours,” she said. “I’ve been on hold forever. Is Ryan here yet?”
“Do you see him?” I said.
Violet handed me a coffee, plopping down onto the sofa, unfazed by the harsh tone. She was twenty-four, five foot eleven, with wild red hair, a gorgeous smile, and a detailed plan to build her own empire (Once Upon a Vegan) by the time she was twenty-eight. She loved to say that when she did, she would be a lot rougher on her Violet than I was.
“Ryan called from the car. He’s sending out Meredith’s statement,” she said. “She had nothing to do with your signature tomato pie or any of your recipes . . . Sunshine has been hacked, yada, yada . . .”
“Who do you think wrote it?”