TWENTY

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“Did you know about this? Did you?”

Without a doubt, anyone within a quarter of a mile could hear her, but she didn’t care. She’d never been so absolutely incensed at anything in her life.

It had taken her a few minutes to find Doug, stomping through the club in her bare feet, but she had him backed into a corner now. He wasn’t going anywhere, not without pushing her aside, and if he tried to do that, she was furious enough to throw him through a wall—without any help from action star Hew Hayes or a special effects lab.

Even in the club’s dim lighting, she could tell Doug had gone pale. Good, she thought. You should be scared.

“Let’s go somewhere quiet,” he said.

“Oh, no. We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to stand here in front of all these people while you explain to me why you SET ME UP.”

“We didn’t—”

“Stop it. Stop it right now.”

“Katie.”

“You brought men in here with the idea that one of them was going to end up being my boyfriend? How sick is that? And you lied to me! You straight-up lied to me, Douglas.”

He’d been consulting with the director when she found him, but the director was gone now. On the phone with Amanda, probably. And when her thoughts moved in that direction, when she began to consider that Amanda had done this—Amanda, who had insisted from the very beginning that everything she did was for Katie’s benefit, not her own, not the studio’s, not the network’s—she thought she might become angry enough to actually explode.

Then she spotted someone filming her on their phone.

She was there in an instant, snatching the phone out of the woman’s hand and waving it in the air. “You think this is appropriate? Do you? Where’s it going? YouTube? Instagram? TMZ?”

The woman grabbed for her phone, but Katie held it out of her reach.

“It’s a job,” the woman shrilled at her. “How were we supposed to know they didn’t tell you what’s going on?”

“So you’re going to make up for that by filming me?”

“Gimme my phone back!”

“These people SET ME UP!” Katie roared.

Then she took a breath, and another. She thought she might throw up, but another couple of breaths settled her stomach a little. The fact that the woman looked truly horrified helped too.

“They told me this was a birthday party,” Katie told her. “They told me they were going to air it as a special. That it’d be fun. They lied to me. Do you get that?”

“They lie all the time,” the woman muttered.

“And you shouldn’t put up with that. None of us should put up with that.” Shuddering, Katie turned back to Doug. “I don’t know what part of your Neanderthal brain told you this was even remotely okay. I don’t need my love live arranged on television. In fact, I don’t need it arranged at all. I’m perfectly capable of finding a partner when I’m ready. When that time comes, I will not need your help. I will not need Amanda’s help. And I definitely won’t have it filmed.”

She was still holding the woman’s phone, but she couldn’t find the energy to go through it and delete the video footage. Her energy was running out rapidly, not helped by the fact that she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast other than a couple of tiny dessert pastries, and she knew she had to get out of there while she could still think straight.

If you could call being this livid ‘thinking straight’.

“I’m going to call an Uber,” she told Doug as she shoved the woman’s phone back into her grasp, struggling to keep her voice somewhere near level. “I’m going to go home and make arrangements to go back to Twin Falls, where I would be right now if you hadn’t set up this nightmare.”

“We have a—” he started.

“I could not possibly be less interested in what you have.”

She waited for a moment, but he didn’t argue the point any further. In fact, he seemed to be having trouble making eye contact with her.

“I can’t believe you had anything to do with this,” she said. “Did it even occur to you to tell me what was actually happening? That if you came to me in the beginning, maybe we could have figured out something that wouldn’t make me feel like meat? My God, Doug. I go along with every single thing Amanda comes up with. I’ve never once told her ‘no’. But this—”

Again, she waited, but he said nothing.

“I’m leaving,” she told him. “And I really don’t care how much fallout it causes. Think about that the next time you want to pull something like this.”

“She’s going to drop you like a hot rock, honey.”

Katie spun toward the source of the voice. It was the director, phone in hand.

“Tell her I don’t care,” she snapped.

Then she got out of there.

 

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

 

She managed to hold herself together until she got home. Then, safely shut inside her condo, away from prying eyes and people with smartphones, she yanked off her clothes, pulled on a soft pair of pajamas, and threw herself down on her bed to cry until she stopped feeling like she was coming apart.

For the first time, she thought she truly understood how Ellery felt every time the tabloids lied about her. Every time they printed a picture of her with a pooched-out tummy and claimed she was pregnant. Every time they claimed she was engaged to someone she’d never even dated.

Every time they treated her like trash.

The sun was going down when her sobs finally tapered off. Feeling as if this couldn’t possibly be real, she shuffled into the kitchen and poured herself a cup of juice, drank it, and poured another. The sweetness tasted good, but it did nothing to ease her headache. Part of her wanted to go on hurting, wanted something physical to point to as the result of what they’d done to her, but her common sense managed to surface long enough to tell her that that wouldn’t accomplish much.

She took a couple of aspirin, cut some slices of cheese off the block she’d bought on a much better day, and ate them with a handful of crackers. A decent meal would be better, she knew, but she didn’t think her stomach would tolerate it. She tried warming up some soup, but she could only eat a little of it.

How could they have done this?? she kept wondering.

She couldn’t call her parents, or one of her brothers, or her friend Denise. They were too far away, and making them angry wouldn’t help anyone. It would just frustrate them.

So she called the only person who would understand.

Ellery listened quietly until Katie had finished telling her what had happened. Half an hour later, she was standing at Katie’s door, her face half-hidden by an enormous pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap. Katie had given her the gate code for the parking garage, so she’d been able to come up without exposing herself to anyone who might be stalking the building.

Katie was almost certain there was someone out there. Maybe a hundred someones.

“I’m sorry,” Ellery told her with a catch in her voice. “I didn’t know anything about it.”

She took off the cap and sunglasses. She hadn’t put on any makeup, and without it, she looked like any ordinarily pretty young woman you might run into at the mall, or taking her kids to preschool, or shopping at the market. Her shirt was a little rumpled, and her jeans had a tear in one knee. Not an artistically placed one, something that had been there when she bought them; it was a tear that was the result of her having worn them until they were soft enough to rip.

Ordinary. An ordinary human being.

“I walked out,” Katie told her. “I couldn’t go along with it for one more minute. They kept telling me I couldn’t, that there were contracts involved, but I never agreed to any of it.”

“It’ll give the lawyers something to do,” Ellery murmured.

She sank down on Katie’s couch as if she hadn’t had an ounce of energy to spare in at least a week. Maybe years, Katie thought. Maybe Ell hadn’t had any real energy since the tabloids had started pursuing her.

Ellery didn’t ask for anything, but Katie brought her a glass of juice.

“I don’t have any wine in the house,” she told her co-star.

“That’s okay. I don’t drink much anymore. It triggers my migraines. The juice is fine.”

They ended up holding each other, slumped on the couch, crying and laughing at the same time. To Katie, it felt awfully good, being with someone who understood, feeling close to Ellery, finally bonding with her as something other than a fellow actor, although neither one of them had ever wanted to be in this position, no matter how much they were being paid.

“We should quit,” Ellery said. “We should just quit. Both of us.”

“That would give the lawyers something to do.”

“I like lawyers. My cousin is a lawyer. They should have plenty of good, serious work to keep them busy. It takes a lot of fees to pay for those vacation homes in Boca and those new Lamborghinis.”

“Your cousin drives a Lamborghini?”

“My cousin is an ambulance chaser in Oklahoma City. I don’t know what he drives. He makes good money, though.”

“Would he hire us?”

Ellery sat back and thought that over, wiping her tear-stained cheeks with the back of one hand. “He might. I used to be able to put together a pretty good business letter. And I can handle the phones.” Sniffling a little, she looked around. “You’re pretty organized. You could do the filing.”

“Let’s do it.”

“We could be roomies. In Oklahoma City.”

That sent them both into a fit of giggles. It didn’t last long, though.

“I don’t know what to do,” Katie said heavily. “I don’t know what Amanda is trying to turn me into, but it can’t be anything I’m going to like. She used to at least pretend to ask for my opinion, but she’s taking over my life. My whole life. It’s supposed to be for my benefit, but—”

“It’s not,” Ellery said. “It never is.”

“So, what do I do? What do we do?”

Katie took a long look at her friend’s face. Ellery had come back to L.A. to do a few small publicity things for the new season of Roomies, and being away from her new love was clearly taking a toll on her. It didn’t take much imagination to guess that she hadn’t been sleeping well, and she hadn’t really eaten well in the whole time Katie had known her, because she desperately needed to maintain that willowy frame that everyone else thought was so appealing.

“I keep asking,” Ellery said, and there wasn’t even a hint of hope in her voice. “Every time something bad happens, I ask, and all anyone will ever tell me is, ‘Just ignore it.’ Or ‘Don’t worry about it.’ As if I’m making a whole big to-do out of nothing.”

The sadness in her eyes spoke volumes.

“I’m sorry,” Katie told her, and meant it. “I’m so sorry, Ell. I just didn’t understand, not really. It all seemed so… dumb. Like something you maybe could ignore, and keep going. If you had to. If there was nothing you could do about it.” She shook her head, and it sent an arrow of pain down her neck. The headache was mostly gone, but her head seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. “I really thought you could put one foot in front of the other and keep going. And you’ve been putting up with this forever. I’m so sorry, Ellery. For everything. I’m so, so sorry.”