“Why would I care if you show that letter—if it’s even real—to anyone?”

“Well,” she said, worrying at her lip with her teeth, “you haven’t had a real romance in ages, if ever. So I guess you’re either dating nobody . . . or dating people you’re ashamed of. And I’m guessing it’s the former and that you don’t want to be outed.”

Outed. My insides turned to ice. I’d carefully kept everything hidden, and yet, this fourteen-year-old could see right through me. “This is a shitty thing you’re doing, you understand,” I warned. “Like, real shitty.” Didn’t Sunny realize that it was fine—celebrated, even—in her generation, but mine had to be quiet about it? That I grew up hearing about the hell on earth that people like me had lived through—or died from? And my mother—

“I know.” There was a hesitant pause as she thought about it again, but she shrugged. “I have gone through everything trying to find out who my dad is. Letters, pictures, documentaries. Everyone thinks it’s Grant Kidd.”

“So there you have it.”

“But Mom swears up and down that it’s not him. Get her to tell me who he really is or I’ll send this to JMC.”

“This is ridiculous,” I exploded.

“Look, there’s one of their cameramen right now,” she said, waving the letter like a flag to get his attention. For a moment, I considered letting her. If an expert could match the handwriting to her diary, if the resulting attention would splash my name on the front page of every gossip blog . . . But I didn’t know if I wanted my personal life out there for consumption.

I always play to win. This was not the best hand to be dealt right now.

I shook my head. “Okay. But I actually don’t know. I’ll have to ask her.”

Soleil brought her arm down. I walked toward the throng of people at the after-party. It was easy to find Merry, hair so light it glowed among all the other heads, neck bent forward as she was sipping and chatting easily with a group of people. “We need to talk,” I murmured to her, and she disentangled herself slowly.

We found ourselves an open corner and stood as a trio. “Merry, your daughter is blackmailing me into finding out who her father is.”

Merry blinked once. “What?” She turned to Soleil and repeated, “What?!”

Instead of shrinking, as I would have if my mother exclaimed with such vitriol, Soleil seemed to grow. With hands on her narrow hips, she retorted, “I deserve to know.”

“By blackmailing—wait, how does she even have anything on you, Rose?” Merry shook her hands in the air, waving the thought away. “Never mind, I don’t need to hear the answer to that.”

“I don’t know what is going on,” I continued, “and honestly, I don’t care. What I do care about is that Sunny here is threatening to expose some of my personal correspondence to benefit herself. So rein in your kid.”

I turned to leave, but Merry caught my arm after I’d taken only one step. “Rose. Wait.” Her eyes glistened.

Something in her voice made me go still. A hurt that I wasn’t expecting, a desperation I hadn’t thought her capable of. I whispered, “What happened to you?” I realized that I had never considered Merry’s ill-timed pregnancy as something that had been wrought by violence or coercion. I’d assumed, like everything else, it was something she’d brought upon herself.

Her eyelashes fluttered fast and I felt a pang of pity for her. Using my arm as a rudder, she steered us into a corner, where the music only echoed and Soleil couldn’t hear. “I can’t talk about it,” she murmured. “You know what people said about me back then. Everyone will say I—that I deserved it. And what would that do to a girl her age?” Merry slid her eyes back toward her daughter, who stood quizzically where we’d left her, for once concerned that this dig for information might, in fact, be bad news for her.

I gently removed Merry’s hands from my forearm. “If she keeps chasing after this, she’s going to learn sooner or later. You need to get ahead of this. And what sort of example are you setting for her if you’re always going to run from your past?”

She stepped away, her head backlit by a light fixture so her face was in darkness. When she spoke again, her voice was cool. “And you? What’s she got on you that you’re taking her side? Why are you scared of my fourteen-year-old?”

I wouldn’t let her words penetrate me. My armor was back up, solid. “You know what, Meredith? This isn’t about me being scared. So what if you were the Other Woman back then? If something bad did happen, I’d expect Meredith-Warner-Merry-Cherry-Gloss to shout about who wronged her and how that person is a piece of shit. You’re not no one. You’re a Gloss girl, for fuck’s sake. Are you the woman who set fire to Grant Kidd’s house or not?”

She took another step away from me. “You knew about that?”

I snorted. “You think Marisa Marcheesa, Princess of Hollywood, would set a fire? There’s a bigger chance that Lucy Bowen would win an Oscar than that happening. I can’t figure out if you did it by accident or on purpose, but I figured Grant deserved it.”

“Don’t tell anyone about that,” she said nervously. “It wasn’t supposed to burn that entire wing. I was just making a point, that’s all.”

“It’s just lucky Marisa was around to muddy the waters, huh?”

Merry knew exactly what I was implying.

She nodded once, looking at her palms, playing with the diamond ring on her left hand. “Okay,” she said finally. “Okay. You’re right.”

“Of course I’m right.” Rosy always looking out for Merry, as usual.

“I’ll talk to Soleil.”

32.

Tuesday

Yumi

I popped the last bite of my Quarter Pounder in my mouth and wiped my hands on a paper napkin. My appointment with the new producers for Sing It, America! had me on pins and needles. I should have rehired my agent to negotiate for me, I thought, or hired a new one. I didn’t know why I was so nervous; my anxiety felt unfounded, since I didn’t know if I even wanted the job. I’d been out of the Hollywood scene for a while now, even if I had made a small cameo in Stan Harold’s movie. For the most part, I’d been living modestly off my royalties and the divorce settlement, paying taxes like a normal person.

I looked in the rearview mirror, checking to make sure my teeth were clean, and reapplied lipstick. “There’s no harm in being prepared to hear what they have to say.” I spoke the words neatly to my reflection, blotting on the clean side of the McDonald’s napkin.

When I got to the ninth floor of the FPZ office building, a young guy in a suit hopped up to greet me. “Ms. Otsuka!” He extended a hand. “I’m Mike Parsons. We spoke on the phone. Right this way.”

I followed him into a small, comfortable conference room, where a few other figureheads sat.

“Hello, Ms. Otsuka, thank you for joining us,” said a tall, sandy-haired man with thick-framed glasses. “I’m Henry Grafton—I head the network’s programming—and I’d like to introduce Lila Landry and John Grant, executive producers for Sing It.” I sat, and Henry instructed Mike, the assistant, to provide coffee for the room.

“As you know,” Henry Grafton said, getting right down to business, “FPZ is rebooting Sing It. It’s been off the air for a few years but has a huge legacy and we think we can revive its booming franchise. We are trying to find the right judges for the reboot—people who are known in the industry, nothing too flashy, you understand, not some hot new star who hasn’t been tested. We need tried-and-true stars like yourself to be on the panel.”

I smiled slightly and nodded, taking a sip of the coffee politely, even though I had no taste for it.

“For the first season,” Lila Landry said, ignoring the cup set down in front of her, “the judges were a mix of talent. Some were people only the industry insiders knew, like Marsha Campbell from Big Disc. But others, like Emma Jake, were big names that had dominated the charts in years past.”

“We understand you’ve been retired for some time.” Henry picked up where Lila left off. “We were hoping that you would come out of quote-unquote retirement to help make the rebooted Sing It a success. Be the next Emma Jake.”