May 20th, 2016
I’d only been in LA for a couple of months, but I’d quickly found out the traffic here was a fucking mess. We’d left the hotel over an hour ago, and what should have been a quick, twenty-minute drive had turned into sitting in gridlocked traffic for nearly forty-five minutes.
The driver headed down the ramp to the parking garage located in downtown LA, and Ivy fidgeted beside me. Her knee bounced erratically, and she kept tapping the tips of her fingers across the top of her black dress pants.
She was a little ball of nervous tension and anxiety.
The anticipation of meeting with Cold’s screenwriter in hopes that someone could assist with her desire to stop the movie from being released to the public had gifted Ivy with another night of restless sleep.
Her exhaustion showed through the soft, dark circles under her eyes and the raspy, tired tone of her voice.
But it was apparent she wasn’t thinking about being tired or wanting to go back to bed right now. She was far too amped up, and adrenaline had taken over.
The SUV pulled to a stop in front of the basement entrance of the garage, and I looked over at Ivy. She worried her teeth against her lip ruthlessly, cutting at the delicate skin with the sharp point of her canine. I reached out to steady her still-tapping fingers and hopefully curtail the damage to her lip.
“You ready?”
A deep sigh escaped her lungs. “I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
I clasped her hand in mine. “Just remember that no matter what happens, no matter what the outcome is, we’re going to get through it, okay?”
She nodded, resolute. “Okay.”
A minute later, we were out of the vehicle and in the elevator.
And a few minutes after that, June Gatto’s assistant greeted us at the entrance of the sixth floor.
“Hi, I’m Fiona,” she said, standing in the entryway, her body clad in a pristine business suit and her hair pulled up in a tight bun. Her voice, her smile—it was all fake and phony, but I’d become accustomed to that kind of bullshit since I’d been staying in LA with Ivy.
I was a man who’d take blunt over sugarcoated any fucking day of the week, and the insincere smiles and pretentious behavior grated on my goddamn nerves.
“June is in her office finishing up a last-minute conference call, but she’ll be ready shortly,” she updated as she led us into an open and airy room where lush couches, clear glass tables, and big potted plants highlighted the space. “Please, sit down, make yourselves comfortable.” She gestured toward the room. “Can I get you anything to drink while you wait? Espresso? A glass of champagne?”
A glass of fucking champagne?
Jesus Christ, these people lived in a fantasy world.
Both Ivy and I declined and sat down on one of the cream velvet sofas.
I looked around the space and tried to picture a man like Chief Pulse in a room like this. He would’ve damn near had a stroke hearing someone offer champagne at a business meeting, much less fucking espresso.
I nearly laughed at the thought.
Ivy picked up a magazine from the table, but she quickly threw it back onto the glass surface with a sigh.
I glanced down to find the magazine in question—a fucking gossip rag—actually had her face splashed across it. The headline read: Ivy Stone’s Secret Battle with Depression.
Secret battle with depression? What a load of fucking bullshit.
This woman was grieving the death of her sister. A death that had occurred at the hands of a man who had a sick fascination with Ivy. If that didn’t push anyone toward some emotional trauma, I didn’t know what would.
Yet this celebrity gossip magazine felt it was their right to use someone’s pain to increase their fucking readership.
It was completely messed up.
Anger filtered into my veins and tingled inside my hands. I flexed my fingers against the discomfort and did my best to push the emotion away.
Now wasn’t the time to let anger and rage fester, especially over a goddamn gossip magazine I had no control over.
I was here to be a pillar of support for Ivy, not get her worked up even more than she already was.
With a strong and steady hand, I reached out and patted the top of Ivy’s bouncing knee. She glanced over at me, and a pitiful laugh left her lungs.
“I swear, I’ll be less insane once this meeting is over,” she said in spite of herself. “It’s making me so anxious. I just don’t want it to end up the same way as the meeting with the studio head.”
I smiled at that. “Baby, you don’t have to explain anything to me. Be as insane as you want.”
A real smile crested her lips. “Now, I think you might be asking for trouble right there.”
I chuckled softly. “I’ll take as much of your trouble as I can get.”
Her green eyes searched mine, and eventually, she whispered, “Thank you for being here.”
I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and pressed a soft kiss to her hair. “I will always be here for you. Never forget that.”
A soft sigh escaped her lungs, and she rested her head against my shoulder, and the quiet, peaceful silence spread into an otherwise emotionally chaotic moment.
But it ended as quickly as it started.
Fiona stepped into the room, smiling like the three of us were fucking family.
It was a sham of a smile and made my stomach churn with discomfort.
“June is ready for you,” she said and gestured toward the opposite side of the room where a short hallway opened. “If you’ll follow me, I’ll take you to her office.”
We walked behind her, down the marble-floored hallway until we reached what I assumed was the screenwriter’s office.
Fiona opened the door, and both Ivy and I stepped inside.
“June,” she announced. “I have Ivy Stone here for you.”
The woman turned around in her chair, and the instant my gaze met the features of her face, I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience.
My stomach fell like a rock, straight through my body and into my shoes, and a sharp, painful intake of breath filled my lungs.
Ivy, unaware of the shrapnel spinning wildly from my mind, continued walking into the room toward the leather chairs on the opposite end of the big glass desk.
I…I couldn’t move my legs.
I was paralyzed and poisoned as years of life fled from my body and heart and slammed me right back into the mind of a boy.
A boy who hadn’t been ready to be a man.
Glancing back to pull me closer as she sat, Ivy finally noticed my distance. Her brow furrowed down, eyes searching mine erratically.
The woman behind the desk hadn’t stopped looking at me. Not for one moment, not for one second. Ivy wasn’t even here as far as she was concerned.
Big blue eyes. Jet-black hair. The same nose. All of the familiar qualities were nearly too real to process, but I could tell she’d weathered the time well.
She looked uncertain and unsure, but eventually, she quelled the silence. “Levi,” the stranger said my name like it was a prayer, and it only took hearing that one word from her lips to confirm everything.
June Gatto wasn’t just the screenwriter on Cold.
June Gatto was June Fox.
My fucking mom.
The woman who’d abandoned our family when I was just a child.
The woman I hadn’t seen or heard from in years.
The woman I used to cry myself to sleep over when I was a kid, hoping and praying she’d come back to us.
The fucking awful woman who’d torn my family apart and changed my father irreparably. He’d never been a kind, caring man, but he’d been tolerable. After she’d left, I’d lost everything.
“Do you—Do you two know each other?” Ivy asked, glancing back and forth between us in confusion.
“She’s my mother,” I said without pretense. I’d have loved to make it more complicated or eased into the blow, but the words were spoken for me from a place I didn’t recognize. A place where the world kept hitting, blow after blow, until you couldn’t hold up your head anymore.
“W-what?” Ivy’s eyes grew wide as saucers at my words. “This is your mom?”
My shock quickly morphed into rage, and I stepped forward until I stood directly in front of her desk.
“You’re fucking June Gatto?” I questioned, my voice rising with each word. “You’re the screenwriter for Cold?”
“I’m sorry you had to find out this way,” she responded, and I felt Ivy’s presence move beside me. “I didn’t know you were coming to this meeting. Otherwise, I would have handled it differently.”
“Handled it differently?” I questioned, and my jaw ticked with rage. “What the fuck does that even mean?”
“I wouldn’t have let it happen like this.”
“You mean you wouldn’t have let it happen at all,” I retorted, sarcasm dripping from my voice like a faucet. A sharp gasp left her mouth at my words, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t hold back. I had twenty plus years of pain and trauma from this woman, and I sure as fuck wasn’t going to stand there and make this easy on her when she hadn’t given a fuck about making anything easy on me.
Me.
Her son.
Her only child. Well, at least, I thought I was her only child. For all I knew, she’d replaced us with a shiny new family that met her selfish fucking needs. “I mean, we both know your track record, Mom. When it comes to me, you’re the master of the disappearing act.”
“I’m sorry I left, Levi, but I had to. I couldn’t survive in that small town. I couldn’t stay there with your father. He…he didn’t leave room for anyone else.”
“Oh, but it was perfectly fine for you to leave your kid to suffer through it?” I tossed back. “You do realize what my father was like after you left, right? You realize that he didn’t magically turn into a loving guy? Disconnected, narcissistic. If it weren’t for Sam Murphy and Red Pulse, I’d have had to fend for myself. All because of you.”
The sham of a woman that was my mother stood up from her seat, and her eyes stared back at me earnestly. She looked sad and pained, and I didn’t care to see any of it. I refused to feel any sort of sympathy for her discomfort.
“I had no idea,” she whispered. “I had no idea it was like that for you. If I would’ve known—”
“You mean if you would’ve cared to know,” I cut her off before she could give me some line of bullshit about how she would have done things differently. “Christ, how could you think it would be anything else?” I shook my head. “You just didn’t give a shit about anyone else but yourself.”
“I do care, Levi. I still care.”
The realization of all that this meant slapped me across the face, and my head swam with the fact that she was the fucking screenwriter. The person who had made my real-life hell into a goddamn movie.
“All this fucking time. All this time and you’re the one who did this to me? You’re the one who sensationalized one of the worst moments of my life into a goddamn movie for other people’s entertainment? Do you even understand how completely fucked that is? How fucking cruel that is?”
She shook her head. “That’s not why I did it, Levi. I did it for you—to help you, not to hurt you.”
A shocked laugh left my lips. “To help me? Oh, that’s rich. Please, explain to me how you thought this movie would help me.”
“You needed to face it, Levi,” she said. “Red sent me updates…” She stuttered as my face turned stormy, and then she lowered her voice cautiously. “…for a while. He stopped. Honestly, I think he was hoping I would come back.” Her throat quivered. “I couldn’t face you. Even then, I knew you wouldn’t take my appearance well. I knew you wouldn’t want to see me. I knew my presence would just hurt you,” she said, and my skin crawled at the sight of actual tears in her eyes. Did she think a few measly pools of liquid regret could really erase what my life had been like as a result of her selfishness?
“And why the hell might that be, Mom? Why wouldn’t I want to see the woman who left me for her own gain?” I snapped.
She twisted her lips. “I guess…I guess it was why I wrote the screenplay for this story. Sure, it’s about Grace. But for me, it was always about you. It was so hard seeing the tragedy that you had to live through on the news and in the papers. And I just…I just—”
“Two fucking times,” I cut her off. I didn’t need or want to hear another word of her bullshit excuses or reasons. “This is twice you’ve ruined my fucking life,” I said, vibrating with the power of my words.
I felt Ivy’s presence beside me shift closer, a soft hand settling on my shoulder.
That gentle hand of hers was the only thing keeping me steady.
“Do you even understand what this movie has done? The pain and trauma and tragedy that’ve occurred because of it?” I questioned, and my voice started to rise again.
I thought about Dane and Camilla.
I remembered the way Boyce had looked when I’d walked into the house and he’d had a knife to Camilla’s throat.
But, unbidden as it was, I also thought about how if it hadn’t been for that fucking movie, I never would have met Ivy.
It was irony and pain and bittersweet all rolled up into one giant confusing clusterfuck of emotions.
I didn’t really know what to say or do after that.
I just stood there, frozen to my spot, staring at a woman I should’ve known, but was a complete stranger in my eyes.
Ivy’s hand squeezed my shoulder, and I glanced down to find her looking up at me, her big green eyes filled with so much concern it made my chest ache.
She’d come here for a reason.
And it sure as fuck wasn’t so I could be painfully reunited with my absent mother.
“Stop the movie,” I blurted out and met my mom’s eyes. “If you really want to help me. If you really want to do something for me, your fucking son, then don’t let this film be released.”
“I-I wish I could, Levi,” she said, and her voice was soft with sadness. “I really wish I could. But I can’t. I’ve tried. But the contracts that were signed give the studio full control over what happens with this movie. I’ve already had my lawyers scour through every detail, and there is nothing anyone can do.”
“Wow,” I muttered and shook my head. “Well, I hope it was all worth it, Mom. I hope you’re enjoying your Hollywood life. I hope you’ve gotten everything you wished for. Money. Success. Zero parental responsibilities. Or shit, maybe you have other kids. Whatever this brand-new life of yours entails, I hope it’s everything you ever dreamed of.”
Her mouth turned down at the corners. “Levi—”
“No.” I lifted my hand. “I don’t want to hear anything you’re about to say. Your words mean shit to me. And you sure as fuck don’t deserve any more of my or Ivy’s time.”
“Levi…I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
This time, I completely ignored her. From now on, I only had eyes for Ivy.
“I need to leave,” I said.
“I know,” she whispered back and grasped my hand in hers.
“Levi…wait…” June Gatto moved around her big fucking desk and tried to stop us, but I was done.
Done with talking.
Done with feeling.
Done with her.