Epilogue
Camera lights flashed as Jake and Claire advanced down the red carpet. The January chill didn’t exist that year in southern California. It was one of the warmest winter nights on record, and Claire got away with wearing a sleeveless gown that was more beautiful than anything she had worn before marriage and a baby.
Her husband may have written the movie they attended the premier for, but it was Claire that everyone wanted to photograph. Her recently dyed hair had also been curled to give a buoyant quality that could only work on a night like that. The red lipstick and bright eyes her stylist provided before she left her downtown penthouse was likewise a smash hit in a town that loved Old Hollywood as much as it loved its pin-up models.
I might as well be a pin-up model with this baby weight. Jake told her she still glowed even after the birth of their daughter a month before. This was Claire’s first public appearance since then, however, and she soaked up the attention.
“Mrs. Carter! Mr. Carter!” They were the most well-loved Carters since Beyoncé and Jay-Z, that was for sure. Who knew I would love being Mrs. Carter this much? The press loved it, too, especially after their roles in the Hollywood accusations came to light. Yet even with the press up their asses, the newlyweds had pledged to keep their life relatively private – especially now that they were parents. The press would only get whatever answers the Carters had prepared, and that was it. “What do you have to say about the rumors that claim you’re making a movie together?”
Claire had been expecting that one. She offered the reporter a lovely smile and said, “All the rumors are true. My husband has written a wonderful new romance that we’ll begin production on next month.”
More lights went off. More shouts sounded. “Will you be starring in it, Claire?”
“No word on that, yet. I’ve merely auditioned. You should see the tape! Nine months pregnant and auditioning to be in the next hit romance movie.”
She shared a knowing look with her husband. The audition tape would be leaked that evening. Jake was so sure that his wife had knocked it out of the park that nobody would doubt her casting. At first, Claire had been slightly perturbed that Jake claimed to have loved her for years. Now? It made total and complete sense. Not a troubling thing about it when a man loved her like Jake did.
“How’s Dominique doing?”
Claire laughed. “Our daughter is healthy and keeps us up half the night. My mother-in-law says we should’ve picked a better name to honor the Dominguezes, though.”
“That’s the name I write under,” Jake explained. “My pen name is J. Dominguez, in honor of my mother’s family.”
“Carmen Carter, correct?”
“She goes by Dominguez now.”
This was exactly what they hoped the conversation would look like. Their PR advisor had sent out a memo to the major entertainment reporters that the Carters would not be accepting questions about Arthur tonight. Instead, they would rather discuss Claire’s legacy or the other side of Jake’s family, if people were that insistent that the couple were not interesting enough.
Luckily for them, there was so much news that year that it was impossible to only talk about one thing. If it wasn’t the shotgun marriage that shocked the parts of Hollywood that still had some shock in them, it was the birth of their daughter, who made front page of the papers – and then was promptly hidden away, hopefully for her childhood. The public got the newborn photos. The family got their privacy.
Neither Claire nor Jake wanted to dwell on their personal lives, however. They were more inclined to discuss the movie and the one they were working on together. Claire loved to brag that her husband wrote the role for her, but he insisted that she had to audition like everyone else. (Only nobody else auditioned, and Claire nailed hers so hard that she was more confident than ever that she could play the role of Tiffany Colt, young Hollywood heiress who goes through a string of bad boyfriends until meeting a reclusive writer in the Californian hills.)
“Come on, my lovely wife.” Jake looped his arm around his wife’s midsection and led her to the theater entrance. “We have a movie to watch. Then, home.”
Claire grinned. “I love that part. The going home part.”
“Home is where the heart is, after all. Home and family.”
“Family is the heart.”
They both stopped in the entrance of the theater. Tomorrow, they would find a million sweet pictures of them online. They would even top some of the month’s “Most Aww-inducing Pictures” lists, because everyone who saw them standing in that illuminated doorway, wearing their red carpet best, claimed it was the most wholesome display of romantic love they had ever seen. In Hollywood, no less!
“Isn’t it so nice being able to say that?”
Claire kissed her husband’s cheek. “It is. The absolute greatest.”
Some – including their own mothers – called them fools for getting so involved so quickly. But, as Jake put it late at night in bed and through the words he wrote on the page, “We have the rest of our lives to make up for seven minutes in Heaven.”
(…At least the rest of their children were not conceived in closets. Even some couples evolved beyond that!)