Page 4 of The Holiday Ex-Files

I bobbed my coffee bag up and down. “I think she mentioned that.”

Noah poured the perfect amount of half-and-half into my cup before reaching for a pink packet of sugar and handing it to me.

I couldn’t help but smile at him when I took the sugar. We were acting like an old married couple. I pushed that thought out of my head. The thought of marriage in any form, to anyone, made me feel itchy all over—like a bad case of poison ivy. I shuddered and scooted away from Noah. Not like Noah ever thought of me that way. In fact, I knew the main reason for his visit. It was always the same thing.

I grabbed a spoon out of the drawer nearest me and stirred my coffee to perfection. “So, who do you want me to crop out of your photos this time?” I tried to keep the snark out of my voice. After all, it was my specialty and what I was famous for. Let’s just say catching your husband having sex under the C tree with one of his clients, now wife, kind of does crazy things to you. Like making you stay up all night after the incident, cropping him out of all your wedding photos, and perhaps making a few where he was holding his bloody head in his arms while I shoved it full of wedding cake. In my state of shock and dismay, I had done the only thing I could think of—I’d posted those babies online with the caption: Came home early from a business trip to surprise my husband, instead I got the surprise of my life when I caught him decking someone else’s halls under our tree. ’Tis the season to be salty. Falalalala.

I still had a hard time wrapping my head around the response that post got. It had now been shared millions of times, to my ex’s and his influencer wife’s dismay. For me, though, it had become a lifeline. When people began sharing their own terrible breakup stories with me and wondering if I could do the same thing to their wedding photos, or any photos with exes in them, it helped me deal with my own excruciating pain. More like mask it. At least it gave me a new side job since I couldn’t bear to keep doing lifestyle shoots for families. Even though I was good at it. Like really good. I had gotten so many requests to crop out exes that The Holiday Ex-Files was born.

I lovingly called my fans and clients the Ex-Filers. There were even Ex-Filers chapters across the country now. Most of them had monthly get-togethers, like a support group. I started one here too. We mainly held charity events like the Halloween Bash that would support the women and children’s shelter. A lot of the holidays now gave me a rash, but Halloween was acceptable because for one night I could pretend to be someone else. Someone who didn’t wish her life had turned out differently.

Noah did a sidestep to remove the distance I had placed between us. When he stood so close, I was reminded how tall he was. He had a good six inches on my five-feet-nine frame. Our heights had made us good basketball players. We’d both played in college. I got a good whiff of him too—he smelled like sugar and spice. Basically, he was a big snickerdoodle. A long time ago, I’d asked him for the name of his cologne because it was yummy and I wanted to buy some for his pig of a best friend. Noah’s response was, “It’s my natural scent, I call it stud muffin.” I knew then he was a player. Add in a string of girlfriends a mile long—who all wanted to gobble him up, leaving not a crumb—and his status was firmly cemented.

With a big grin, Noah reached into his jeans’ pocket and pulled out a flash drive.

“You know, flash drives are so 2010. You could email me the photos or upload them to the cloud on my website.”

“I could, but I love seeing the way your emerald eyes narrow and judge me. And the dulcet tones of the lecture you always give me warms my heart,” he teased me.

I scrunched my face, totally judging him. “I just don’t get it. I swear you have a new girlfriend every two weeks. Why bother taking pictures with her? You could just delete the photos. What do you do with all these photos of yourself when I’m done editing them, anyway?” Sure, he was beautiful, even conceited at times, but I’d never thought of him as someone who worshipped himself.

“Why do you care so much?” he said with such a smirk.

“I don’t, it’s just now that you’re thirty-two, don’t you think you should slow down? Maybe try monogamy.” Not like I condoned coupledom, but how many women did he need to date? More like how many hearts did he need to break? “Or even try being single. It’s not a bad life.” Well, it could be at times, but I wasn’t going to mention it.