The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes

“You’re fine with drugs but not me?”

“This isn’t about you!” Rose shouted, rising quickly from the couch. “It was never about you. It was about Gloss! I’m doing what is best for Gloss!”

I stepped back into my dress and buttoned it roughly, unevenly. I could feel anger in my trembling fingers. “You realize that someday we will not be Gloss. And you will look back on this moment and wonder why you decided to choose Gloss over any happiness.”

She laughed gutturally. “I’ll never be happy. Especially not with you. Not truly.”

“And why is that?” I expected to hear more bullshit about her mother or her upbringing.

But Rose leveled a look at me. It pierced through one side of my body and went through the other, skewering me whole. “Because,” she said simply, “I can never be happy with anyone who loves me back.” And I could see it was true. It would always be true for Rose. She always wanted what she couldn’t have, and rejected anything that came to her easily. Gloss’s success, Gloss’s tour schedule, Gloss’s everything.

And then the penny dropped. “You sold me out to the tabloids.”

She rubbed at her nose, playing coy. “What?”

I knew her well enough to understand her admission. It made sense. Yumi, concerned that I was in love with an abuser, gossiped with Veronica and then had the sense to talk to management and Rose, because they knew how to handle these things. And instead of asking me for the real story, Rose told the gossip rags a lie, betting that an average person like Alex wouldn’t have the means or know-how to deny it fast enough before it spread like wildfire. And look at what happened: Gloss was on everyone’s lips, Gloss was on the cover of every magazine. Alex had paid the price for our astronomical fame, and I knew exactly why Rose did it.

“You realize that Alex has been terrorized to all hell, right?” I asked her accusingly. “He can barely walk anymore. He almost died!”

“But he didn’t. And we made fat checks. So what’s the problem?”

The problem was that the woman I loved was a woman I hated. That was the problem.

And I just left, my vision bleary with frustrated tears.

I felt betrayed by everything in my life. Yumi for taking a stab at what happened between Alex and me, and getting it so wrong. Peter, for believing Stephen; myself, for trusting the image of Stephen I’d had in my head for years. Alex wouldn’t speak to me anymore, and I’d lost my Houston friends. And Rose . . . for everything.

Everything about Gloss had made my dreams come true—and ruined my life all in the same fell swoop.

I couldn’t do this anymore.



34.



Tuesday



Merry



It was either tell or be told on, and so my hands were tied.

I’d shepherded Soleil home after the premiere and, as she slumped against the passenger seat gazing at her phone, I’d said, “Are you sure you don’t want to let me know what you’ve got on Rose? Maybe we can tackle her together.”

She’d shrugged with one shoulder and muttered, “I don’t care what I have on her. I want to know about my dad.”

“It’s just . . . she has information about me that could be damaging. You understand?”

“Mm-hmm.” Soleil didn’t look up from her phone.

I didn’t want to tell Soleil that, if she released whatever information she had about Rose, Rose would let people know I was responsible for arson. And, okay, I hadn’t meant to burn down the whole west wing of Grant Kidd’s house. I was upset that he wasn’t listening to me—I had a weird feeling about the music video director we had just worked with, and he’d called me paranoid—and look where that went.

After he’d left, I’d lit some aromatic candles. Then I burned a Polaroid of myself taken in wardrobe that day at the video shoot, angry about the way I’d bungled the underwater filming, and dropped it in a trash can before the corner could burn my fingers. The can was coated in flammable metallic paint and combusted quickly. I watched it for a minute, the flames rising higher as more of the paint flaked and spat, dancing toward the curtains. I flipped a framed portrait of Marisa off the bureau and let that burn merrily. Then the curtains caught flame, red eating the blue drapery. When I finally realized my temper was probably going to get me killed, I escaped to the lawn by the guest house. That was where firefighters found me, coughing feebly and with sooty fingers, when they arrived.

Coincidentally, Marisa had been nearby as well, and she was a person of interest by virtue of being the angry wife. No one could pin it on anybody, which was just as well, but Grant and I were at the end of our run anyway.

And then Noah Decker seized his little opportunity in the guise of “discussing reshoots,” and the story wrote itself.

Before our flight to Houston, I called Justine to ask for her opinion. Sometimes she’s my interim therapist and lawyer wrapped up in one, but even she didn’t know about Soleil’s biological father or the real source of the fire. We spoke in generalities.

“I have to say that I dislike both of these ideas,” Justine said frankly. “One is accusing a man publicly of sexual assault, which is a he-said, she-said situation, but to add a child to the equation . . . But the other is an actual crime? How bad of a crime?”

Maybe I’d outgrown Justine. “Thank you, Justine,” I said, and hung up the phone.

Rose was right—Soleil would find out one way or another, and it was probably lucky that she hadn’t sent off for a cheek-swab genealogy test and was instead needling me for the information.

We flew to Houston that afternoon, and as soon as we touched down, Soleil had her phone in her hand. She went very still. “Um, Mom?”

The note of fear in her voice made my stomach clench. “What is it?” What fresh horrors were in store now?

“I don’t know how—” She pointed the screen toward me. It was not about Decker.

All of her Instagram mentions were about Rose and Cass, coming in thick and fast. “What the—” I pulled out my own phone and checked Twitter: the trending tag #glossylove. A link: A Glossy Affair, read the headline. I scrolled down. Rosalind McGill, or Rosy Gloss of the former hit pop group Gloss, admits to a relationship with Cassidy Holmes during the girl group’s heyday. Ms. Holmes recently passed—

Amid all the disembarkation noise, Soleil frantically dug through her bag, her fingers closing on a torn white envelope, which she raised in triumph.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s the dirt I had on Rose,” she said ruefully. “I thought I’d lost it and someone published it, but it’s right here . . .”

“No . . . the article here has an admission from Rose herself.” How could this be true? And how could I not have known? Every interaction between the two of them was now cast in a different light. What had Rose said to me? You need to get ahead of this. After Soleil’s blackmailing attempt, she’d probably known it was only a matter of time. Or maybe she was using this news for some strategic gain, to which I was still blind. “Let me see that.”

The letter was from Cassidy to Rose, and I was surprised to read the pain, devotion, and love there. It was dated only a few weeks after she left the group, when we were on our way to Australia. “Where did you get this?”

She squirmed. “From the boxes in the attic that Emily pulled down.”

I rubbed my brow. “Fuck.”

There was more on Twitter—Sterling Royce was getting roasted for dating an underage Lucy Bowen back in the day—and I was glad to see that people were eager to blame him for being a predator. Maybe the tide was changing.

The first-class flight attendant was gesturing for us to exit the plane, and so we got up with our things, the letter still clutched tightly in my hand. We were quiet walking to our car, and quieter still on the drive to the hotel. I had thought Rose and Cassidy hadn’t gotten along. Was it all a cover for their relationship?

“So now you’re never going to tell me,” Soleil said sadly.

“What?”

“You’re never going to tell me who my dad is.”

I reached over and wrapped my hand around hers. I sighed. “I don’t want to. But it looks like I will have to.”

The car dropped us at the front entrance of the hotel, a pink-bricked building close to parks, rather than downtown. We left our bags in the room and grabbed water from the mini fridge. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

It was humid, steam fogging up my sunglasses as we stepped out of the air-conditioned lobby. As we crossed the street, I wondered how much I would tell her. She was already excited, bouncing on her heels with every step that we took. I’d have to quash this mood immediately.

“Turn off your phone and look at me.” She did. Her eyes reflected the same blue as mine. I didn’t see her father in her. Maybe in the twitch of the lip, the cock of the head. But luckily I hadn’t known him very long.

“This is not a pretty story. I am going to tell you that right now.”