The Blackmail Review

Chapter 5 — The Regulars

The counterattack started with a church bulletin.

Jess found out on Monday morning, when Danny burst into her office holding his laptop like it was on fire. “You need to see this,” he said, which was becoming his least favorite sentence and hers.

On the screen: a Facebook post from St. Matthias Parish, three blocks from the bakery. A photo of Rosa Benedetti in a church kitchen, sleeves rolled up, surrounded by trays of bread. The caption read: For 30 years, Rosa has baked the communion bread for our parish. FREE. Every week. For 30 years. If you believe these lies about her bakery, you don’t know Rosa. #SaveBenedettis

Twelve thousand shares.

“That’s not the worst part,” Danny said, scrolling. A food blogger with eighty thousand followers had posted a twenty-minute video: I INVESTIGATED THE BENEDETTI’S REVIEWS. She’d gone through hundreds of the one-stars and found the patterns — the identical phrasing, the accounts that had also reviewed a bait shop in Ohio and a car wash in Arizona on the same day, the “local” reviewers whose profiles were created three weeks ago. “Statistical impossibility,” the blogger said, looking straight into the camera, “unless someone is paying for these.”

Jess watched the whole twenty minutes standing up, her coffee going cold in her hand. The blogger had charts. Timelines. Side-by-side screenshots of reviews posted forty seconds apart with the same typo. It was good work — the kind of good work that made Jess’s stomach drop through the floor, because every chart was a map with an X on it, and the X was her. Eighty thousand followers. Twenty minutes of evidence. And a comment section filling up with amateur sleuths running their own analyses, cross-referencing timestamps, building spreadsheets. The internet had found a mystery, and mysteries have a way of finding their authors.

Then the regulars came. Not a trickle — a flood. Real five-star reviews, hundreds of them, each one with a name Jess recognized from the bakery’s tagged photos, each one with a story.

Rosa made my mother’s 80th birthday cake when we couldn’t afford it. She said pay what you can. We never forgot.

I proposed to my wife in that bakery. Rosa cried harder than her mother did.

My daughter has a nut allergy. Rosa reformulated her entire cookie line so my kid could have a birthday treat like everyone else. Find me another business that does that.

A retired teacher wrote four paragraphs about Saturday morning buns. A firefighter posted a photo of the crew’s standing order. Somebody’s grandmother — somebody’s actual grandmother — left a review that just said “Rosa is family. That is all.” and it got two thousand likes.

By Wednesday, the rating had clawed back to 3.1. By Thursday, 3.4. The bots were still posting — Danny had them on a schedule — but every fake one-star was getting buried under ten real five-stars, and worse, the real reviewers were replying to the fake ones, calling them out by name.

FAKE REVIEW. Karen M. also gave 1 star to a bait shop in Ohio. Nice try.

Dave from Naperville doesn’t exist. I checked. This is a coordinated attack and we all know it.

“This is bad,” Danny said. It was Thursday night, and he looked like he hadn’t slept in days. Dark circles, cold coffee, the smell of the back room clinging to his hoodie. “Jess, I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s like — it’s like the whole neighborhood is an immune system, and we’re the infection.”

“Cool the posting,” Jess said quietly.

“What?”

“Cool it. Pause the bots. All of them.” She stood at her office window, watching the L rattle past. “If we keep hammering while everyone’s watching, we prove the blogger right. Go dark for a week. Let it settle.”

Danny stared at her. “We’ve never gone dark. Not once.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

After he left, Jess pulled up the bakery’s profile. 3.6 stars now. The top review was from a woman named Eleanor: I have bought bread from Rosa Benedetti every Saturday for 31 years. She watched my children grow up. She came to my husband’s funeral with a tray of rolls and stayed to wash the dishes. You cannot review a thing like that with stars.

Jess read it three times. Thirty-one years of Saturday mornings. A funeral. Dishes washed in someone else’s kitchen. She tried to imagine any of her forty-seven clients inspiring a review like that — tried and failed, because her clients didn’t love her. They paid her. There was a difference, and Eleanor’s review had just drawn it in letters ten feet high.

Then she did something she hadn’t done in years: she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and took out a photograph. A woman in a diner apron, young, tired, smiling anyway. Maria Lane. Her mother. The diner had failed when Jess was sixteen — not from bad reviews, there’d barely been an internet then, but from something slower and quieter: a rent hike, a chain moving in across the street, regulars who drifted away one by one until the line at the counter was just Maria, wiping down Formica and pretending not to count the empty stools.

Jess had sworn, standing in that empty diner at sixteen, that she would never be helpless like that. That she would never watch something she loved die slowly while she stood there with clean hands and an empty register.

Clean hands. Rosa’s words.

She put the photo away. Her hands were shaking again.

Her phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number: Ms. Lane? This is Priya Sharma, Chicago Ledger. I’m writing about coordinated fake review attacks on local businesses. I’d love to ask you a few questions about FiveStar Shield’s methods.

Jess stared at the screen until it went dark.

A reporter. A real one, from a real paper. Asking about her methods.

She deleted the text. Then she realized she couldn’t undelete it, it was just gone, which somehow felt worse, like the words were still out there floating around without her.

She called Danny. “Change of plans,” she said, and her voice was steady now, the old Jess, the conductor. “Don’t cool the posting. Kill it. Full stop. Scrub the newest batch of bots — the ones from this week, all of them. And Danny?”

“Yeah?”

“Find out everything about Priya Sharma. Everything.”

She hung up and stood in the dark office, alone with the hum of the servers and the rattle of the L and the terrible, unfamiliar feeling spreading through her chest like ink in water.

It took her a moment to name it.

Fear.

For eighteen months, Jessica Lane had been the storm. Now, for the first time, she could feel the wind changing — and she had no idea which way it was going to blow.