You Lost Us In The Test novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Noon

At eleven-fifty on Tuesday, I was sitting in the second row of a briefing room near Westminster with forty reporters and a jug of water.

The regulator had asked for someone from the lab.

Benedict had said, "You found it. You go."

He was standing at the back by the door anyway, in his one good jacket.

I had Kenzie's stream open on my phone with the sound off.

At eleven fifty-five she came on.

Pink ring light. Pink mug. Her cream blazer.

The viewer count climbed past two hundred thousand in the first minute.

I turned the captions on.

"Hi, babes. So this is really hard for me," she said. "But I have to protect my Loyalty Lab family."

She held up a sheet of paper with a logo I'd never seen.

"I paid for my own independent test. From a real lab. And guess what? BrideGlow is clean. One hundred percent clean."

The chat scrolled so fast I couldn't read it.

"My sister has always been jealous of me," Kenzie said. "Since I was nine years old. She's pregnant and alone in a foreign country, and she's not well, and she made this up to hurt me."

She wiped under one eye with her ring finger.

"I'm not even mad. I'm just sad."

At twelve o'clock the door at the side of the briefing room opened.

A woman in a gray suit walked to the podium and put down one sheet of paper.

The reporters' cameras all clicked at once.

"Good afternoon," the regulator's spokesperson said. "We are today ordering the recall of all BrideGlow tea products from sale in the United Kingdom."

On my phone, Kenzie was still talking.

"Testing has confirmed undeclared senna and sibutramine, a banned prescription drug, at levels that pose a serious risk to health, especially in pregnancy."

In Kenzie's chat, the same word started repeating.

RECALL. RECALL. RECALL.

Someone had pasted the regulator's headline. Then someone else. Then a thousand people.

"Anyone who has purchased this product should stop using it immediately."

Kenzie stopped mid-sentence.

She was reading something off-camera.

The viewer count started falling.

Two hundred thousand. One-eighty. One-forty.

"Okay," Kenzie said, to nobody. "Okay, that's, um."

She looked straight into the lens.

For one second she looked nine years old in my mother's kitchen.

Then the screen went black.

"Stream ended."

I put my phone face down on my knee.

The spokesperson took questions.

A reporter in the front row asked about the two hospitalized women.

← Chapter 13 · All chapters · Chapter 15 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend