Isaac
“Done deal, my friend,” Tyler Duncan said. As he hung up the phone in his office on Wilshire Boulevard, my manager looked extremely pleased with himself.
“You are now seven-point-one million dollars richer.” He ran a hand through his gold hair, his gold Rolex glinting in the bright gold Los Angeles sun pouring through the windows. Tyler reminded me of Matthew McConaughey—shiny, energetic, and always smiling. My polar opposite. Just being in his presence made me tired.
Then his words sank in.
“Seven million…?”
He grinned. “Less our fifteen percent, please and thank you.”
“Jesus.”
“Not bad, not bad, not bad,” Tyler said. “Especially for only your second big studio movie.” He pressed his palms together and bowed his head. “And let’s not forget you have some points coming in off the backend later. That should net you a nice little surprise in your bank account when you least expect it.”
“Seven-point-one million,” I said again. “I have seven million dollars in my account? Right now?”
Tyler laced his fingers behind his head and kicked up his Ferragamos on his desk. “Yes, indeed, my man.”
I nodded, thinking it was surreal. I’d made money on my first film, but not like this. When I came to Hollywood with the casting agent who saw Hamlet, he helped me land a small part in a high-profile movie, which netted me $1.5 million. A staggering amount to someone who’d never seen a bank statement with more than four figures in it.
But seven million?
It was even more astonishing, considering how much I fucking hated acting on camera.
I hated the constant retakes. The stops and starts. Telling the story out of order to an audience of camera crew and boom mic operators. During that first movie, I was sure my loathing of the process was evident on my face and captured in every frame. But the audiences loved me. Hollywood embraced me.
“And the women really like you,” Tyler said when we first met. “You’re a cross between James Dean and Henry Cavill. Hollywood handsome but with a bad boy, rough-around-the-edges danger. Pure catnip, my friend.”
I didn’t give a shit about the marketing plan, so long as I could make the money I needed to quit this fucking business.
Now I had.
I almost felt sorry for Tyler. He thought he had the Next Big Thing sitting across from him, but I was done. $7.1 million was more than enough to pay off my father’s debts to Wexx. I personally wasn’t on the hook for them but my father had died with those debts dragging him down, like Marley’s ghostly chains. I was determined to cut him free. It wouldn’t matter to Wexx. A drop in a bucket they forgot they were holding. But it fucking mattered to me.
“Holy shit,” I breathed. I’d already paid off Benny’s mom’s mortgage. Now I could put Benny through college. I could make sure Marty had everything he could ever want for the HCT. And Willow…
Seven million was a number I’d dreamed of when I’d told her I’d come back to Harmony.
My chest hurt. Tyler saw me rubbing the spot.
“What’s that, compadre? A little indigestion? Hard to swallow that you’re a bona fide millionaire? Get used to it.” He tapped his finger on a copy of Variety folded up on his mahogany and glass desk. “Have you read these reviews? My phone is ringing off the hook for you. Which brings me to the real reason for this little tête-à-tête today.” He leaned over his desk. “Are you ready for this? Quentin Tarantino wants a meeting. Quentin-fucking-Tarantino.”
I got to my feet. “Yeah, thanks, Tyler,” I said absently. “I gotta go.”
“Wait, what?”
“I’ll be in touch.”
Tyler stared. “Be in touch? What’s that mean?” He broke into a Hollywood laugh—the kiss-ass kind that erupted when I hadn’t said anything funny. I hated that too.
“Oh, I get it,” he said. “You going out to celebrate? I’m down. Let’s get us some female companionship and get plowed—”
“Some other time.”
He called after me but I hardly heard him. I had to get the hell out of that office and think. I left the posh suites and hit the pavement under a hard, Los Angeles heat. Nothing like Indiana’s thick humidity that promised green and growing things. This desert heat felt like it was trying to snuff the life out of you.
I jumped into my leased Land Rover. Tyler convinced me it was L.A.’s version of a truck. My Dodge was back in Harmony, put out to pasture at the scrapyard.
The Rover was a sweet ride, and my four-bedroom place in West Hollywood was a fucking palace compared to a junkyard trailer. But both felt like waste. I didn’t need this much. I missed my truck. I missed Marty’s old house and cemeteries with crooked tombstones and hedge mazes…
I missed Willow.
It hit me hard today. Harder than it had in the three years I’d been gone. Typically it slugged me from the outside like a hammer. Now it rose out of me from inside, from the place where I buried all the loss and pain in my life. Now that I had the means to return to Harmony, like I’d promised, it all came back on that current of possibility. The dream and hope was over and the reality was there for the taking if I wanted it.
I raced the SUV in and out of light traffic—by L.A. standards—to my huge place. Four bare walls and hardwood floors. A $12,000-per month storage unit with panoramic views of a city that didn’t feel like mine. Los Angeles was good to me and I was grateful, but it wasn’t home.
I went to my office, which was nothing more than the room where I kept my laptop. I had more rooms than I had stuff to put in them. I didn’t even want a laptop but Tyler said I needed email access and a better cell phone as well. My old phone—the one Willow had the number to—I’d dumped in a trashcan in Dallas during a layover on my flight out of Harmony.
No email. No phone. No way for her to contact me, even if she wanted, and I hadn’t lifted one goddamn finger to find her. I’d cut her out of my life entirely.
I held my head in my hands.
“What the fuck are you doing?” My voice echoed off the walls. “What the fuck have you been doing?”
It made sense back then. The pain was so raw and real. Losing Willow, watching her slip through my fingers on the opening night of Hamlet was like being shot in the heart all over again. After a life of so much misery, I finally had something good and perfect, and it disintegrated; I hadn’t been able to do a goddamn thing to stop it. So I’d rolled with it the only way I knew how.
I got the fuck out and didn’t look back.
The first few months were agony, but each day that passed was another brick in the wall between me and my old life and everyone in it—Marty, Brenda, Benny, Willow—until the wall was miles’ high and years’ thick. The only time I’d been back to Harmony was for my father’s funeral. I’d stayed long enough to see him laid to rest beside my mother, and then I was gone again, back behind the wall.
Now it was crumbling to sand.
It’s not too late, Marty always said. But what if it was? What if something terrible had happened to her?
I opened up my laptop and typed Willow Holloway into the Google search bar.
There she was. First hit, top of the page. My girl.
Goddamn tears stung my eyes. A review in the Harmony Tribune for A Doll’s House playing—of course—at the HCT.
Willow Holloway (20), is miraculous as Nora. A delicate, almost frail young woman who stoically manages the patriarchal conventions of Ibsen’s 1870 Denmark.
“Denmark,” I murmured gruffly, even as hope and pride and love swelled my chest. “We haven’t left Denmark, have we, baby?”
It is the final act of the play in which Miss Holloway’s expressive face reveals the emergence of Nora Torvald. Not a daughter, wife, or young mother, but as a woman—a human being. The realization is stunning to watch, proving that Miss Holloway’s debut performance in Hamlet three years ago was no fluke.
At the bottom of the article was a picture of Willow in a ruffled, high-collared dress that looked as if it were strangling her. Her smile for Len Hostetler, playing her husband Helmer, was sweet and passive, but fire burned in her eyes. She was still fighting.
I swallowed hard and shut the laptop.
“There you go, Pearce. Now you know where she is,” I said. “She came home.”
I left the office and flopped down on my empty, king-sized bed. A state-of-the-art luxury item that had never had a woman in it. When I first arrived in Los Angeles, I tried to date. To forget Willow and lose myself in someone else. But I’d sit across from a beautiful candidate and feel nothing. No desire. No interest. Not even base lust.
I miss her too much. I love her too much.
The closing night performance of A Doll’s House was Saturday, four days away. I tried to harden my heart against the idea of jumping on the next plane out. Tried to ignore the possibility of standing in the same room with Willow. Self-preservation and yet I didn’t know what was worth preserving. My life here was empty. But if I went back to Harmony, was there anything left between us to salvage?
She ended it, I reminded myself. She cut you out and wouldn’t tell you why. No recourse. No second chance. No defying her father’s bullshit. She chose him.
I’d mentally replayed our final scene on Hamlet’s opening night a thousand times. No matter the hurt and anger it dredged up, the heart-breaking, agonized expression on Willow’s face never changed. That night I’d been too blinded by my own pain to see hers. But she’d been dying on the inside too. Because she loved me.
The love was there first.
“Fuck…” I rubbed my hands down my face, then sat up and hurried back to the office.
Now that I knew where she was, the need to see her again was a ravenous hunger, and the simple truth was I’d starve to death without her.
She might hate me, or worse—ignore me, but…
If nothing else, I’ll see her perform. Just that. Start there and see what happens.
I dialed up Tyler. He answered on the second ring.
“What’s up, bro? Change your mind about hanging out?”
“No, man. Listen, I’m going out of town for a few days.”
“Okay,” Tyler said slowly, warily. “When are you coming back?”
I closed my eyes and conjured Willow in the hedge maze, with the sun setting behind her hair and her eyes full of love for me.
“Best case scenario?” I said. “Never.”