The Audience of One

From the back cover

For three years, Harper has believed her boyfriend Dylan, even as he buried himself in his phone and called it work. Then she reads his chat history with Mia, her own best friend, and finds fifty-five complaints about her, each answered with a sympathetic meme. He mocks her clothes, her tears, and her need to be picked up in the rain, while Mia agrees that Harper has always been like this.

Mia has a fingerprint on their front door and comes over six days a week, cooking hot pot and playing hostess while Dylan smiles and obeys. He remembers everything Mia likes and nothing Harper does, not that she avoids spicy food, not her birthday. He even took Mia to Austin during the week Harper lay alone in a hospital with pneumonia.

When Harper finally walks out, Dylan has already texted her father first, painting himself as the patient victim of her temper. Her family tells her to stop picking fights over trivial things, and no one asks what she has been enduring.