A tabloid headline blows Callie's whole identity wide open — and Dakota finally understands exactly what she's been missing right in front of her.
The Uber smelled like cheap cologne and Chinese takeout. Dakota slid into the back seat, the paperback still in her hand, and let the door shut hard enough to make the driver glance in the rearview.
She looked down.
The paperback stared back at her like an accusation.
The fight kept replaying in pieces. Callie’s voice over her shoulder. The book appearing out of the bag. The quotes read in that flat, careful tone. The way the temperature in the hallway had dropped to nothing.
If you need the money so bad, then do a better fucking job.
None of it made sense. Callie was a fangirl. Fangirls got protective. They didn’t go ice-cold and walk out like that. Dakota turned the whole thing over again and still couldn’t find the place where it had tipped from annoyed into whatever that had been.
All of that over a stupid book.
She looked down at it again.
That fuckin' book.
Her phone buzzed against her thigh. Then again. She glanced at the screen. A string of messages from Michaela. She locked it without opening them. She did not have the bandwidth for another obsessive fangirl who thought Forces of Nature was high literature. At least Michaela’s brand of obsession ran warm. Callie’s had been weirdly intense. Cold. Possessive.
The car stopped in front of her building. She climbed out, took the stairs two at a time, and let herself into the apartment. Someone was in the kitchen; the television was on in the living room. She called a short hi toward both sounds and kept moving.
Her room was dark. She dropped her bag, peeled out of her clothes, and pulled on the old, soft sleep shirt that had survived every bad week since college. Then she sat on the edge of the bed.
Her phone lit up again.
Michaela.
Dakota stared at the notification for a long second, then opened it.
why the fuck didn't you tell me your new girlfriend was C.K. fucking Sterling!!!???
Dakota frowned.
what the hell are you talking about
The typing bubbles appeared almost immediately. A link arrived.
She tapped it.
The headline loaded.
Dakota shot up straight, like she had been ejected from the bed.
“Oh my fuck!”
Gossip Rag · Exclusive
EXCLUSIVE: The Secret Life of C.K. Sterling — Child Star, Broke Hollywood Casualty, and the Woman Behind the BookTok Smash Forces of Nature
Forget everything you thought you knew about the mysterious author lighting up bestseller lists and BookTok feeds this summer.
C.K. Sterling — the reclusive writer behind the smash hit Forces of Nature — is none other than Calliope Katherine Sterling, better known to a generation of television viewers as former child actress Maggie Starr, who played the older daughter on the long-running family sitcom Family of Five.
After she aged out of the cute-kid roles that made her famous, the casting calls simply stopped. Hollywood moved on. When Starr finally got a clear look at her own accounts, she discovered most of the money she had earned as a child had been thoroughly managed — and thoroughly spent — by her parents and a longtime business manager. What little remained went toward college.
That was the end of the first act.
Instead of waiting for a second chance that never came, Sterling reinvented herself under a new name and a very different genre. As C.K. Sterling, she has been writing the kind of high-heat, emotionally ruthless romance that has women across the country highlighting passages, arguing in comment sections, and, if the screenshots are any indication, thoroughly ruining their own sleep schedules. Forces of Nature, currently climbing every list that matters and setting the bookish internet on fire, is being widely read as a thinly veiled autobiographical retelling of her own failed marriage — the kind of book that makes readers wonder just how much of the bedroom detail was researched and how much was remembered.
For years she has stayed almost pathologically private. No tours. No face on the jacket. No interviews. Until now.
And here’s where it gets interesting.
Fans have been clamoring for audiobook versions of Sterling’s work for years. Her publisher has never once paid for one. We can exclusively reveal that for Forces of Nature, the author took matters into her own hands — pouring the entirety of her advance into funding the first-ever C.K. Sterling audiobook recording herself, purely for her rabid fanbase.
Budget constraints being what they were, she made a pair of choices that are already sending the fandom into full meltdown:
She cast herself as her own ex-wife.
And she cast her co-narrator as the version of herself on the page.
The sessions are reportedly still underway.
Never fear — it looks like she has found new love with her co-narrator.
Dakota’s thumb stopped scrolling.
At the bottom of the article was a photograph. Streetlamp. Sidewalk. Callie bent over her, Dakota arched backward in the dip, the two of them locked in a kiss she could still feel if she let herself.
It was an out-of-body experience. The shock had knocked her clean out of her own skin. She was standing in her bedroom looking at a moment she had lived from the outside, as if it had happened to someone else.
The door flew open.
Jess first, still in the oversized hoodie she wore around the apartment, then Priya right behind her. Taylor came in last and immediately assumed a defensive posture, like she was guarding the door.
“Dakota?” Jess’s voice was sharp with alarm. “What happened? Are you okay?”
Dakota stood in the middle of the room holding the phone. Her mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Jess crossed the space in three steps and took the phone from her hand without asking. She looked down. Her eyes moved. Then they widened.
“Holy shit.”
Priya crowded in at her shoulder. Taylor stayed by the door, watching.
Jess started reading aloud, voice low and fast.
“Exclusive: The Secret Life of C.K. Sterling—”
She stopped, then kept going.
“Calliope Katherine Sterling, better known as Maggie Starr…”
“Callie,” Dakota said.
Jess’s head snapped up.
“That’s the woman you’ve been working with. The one who kissed you.”
Priya’s eyes went wide. “Someone kissed you?”
Jess was already scrolling again. Her thumb stopped.
The photograph filled the screen.
Streetlamp. Sidewalk. Callie bent over her, Dakota arched backward in the dip, mouths locked.
The room went very quiet.
Taylor was the one who asked it.
“Where the hell did they get a picture of you?”
Dakota stared at the photo. The angle was wrong for anyone standing close. It had been taken from farther down the block, past the reach of the streetlight.
The same stretch of sidewalk where a man’s voice had argued with Callie on more than one night. The nights Dakota had waited for her Uber and decided she was overhearing a lovers’ quarrel.
“Fuck,” she said. “The boyfriend.”
Go fuck yourself.
"So you never faked an orgasm for your boyfriend?"
"No. Never."
She looked up at the three of them.
“It was never a boyfriend. It was the reporter. He was fucking stalking her.”
Jess’s mouth opened. Priya’s hand went to her own throat. Taylor’s jaw tightened once.
“Oh shit,” Jess breathed.
Dakota sat down hard on the edge of the bed. The words kept coming.
“Every time I heard them arguing outside the studio I told myself it was some guy she was dating. I told myself she was straight. And the whole time it was this—this fucking reporter hunting her.”
She dragged both hands down her face.
“Tonight at work we were doing the divorce scene. The end of the book. And I kept missing my cues because my head was somewhere else. I thought she was upset about a fight with her boyfriend. I kept trying to read her face instead of the page.”
Priya put a hand on her shoulder.
“Oh honey.”
Her divorce.
Fuck.
“She walked into that booth and performed the collapse of her own marriage while some guy was out there trying to strip her anonymity,” Dakota said. “And I kept fucking up the lines because I was too busy inventing a boyfriend who never existed.”
Jess sat beside her. Taylor remained by the door.
“And Lauren,” Dakota said, quieter. “When Lauren showed up, Callie stepped between us. No hesitation. She protected me. And I never once did the same for her. I stood on the sidewalk and decided those arguments were none of my business.”
Priya tilted her head. “Is that when she kissed you?”
A short, wrecked sound escaped Dakota. Almost a laugh. Not quite.
“No. That was later.”
She stared at the floor.
“Then tonight. The fight in the hallway. She had my book. She read the margins out loud. And I—”
Not all of us are living as comfortably as you are, fangirl.
She made a small, broken sound.
“Holy shit. She’s the one signing my paycheck. She funded the whole thing with her own advance. She’s my boss.”
Then do a better fucking job.
Dakota’s voice cracked.
“The whole time she was defending the book, she was defending herself.”
No one spoke.
If you hate me so much, why are you here?
She stared at the floor.
Jess put a hand on her back. Priya set the phone down on the dresser like it might burn her. Taylor stayed by the door, still guarding it.
The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. Outside, a car went past.
Dakota did not move.