Some clarity breaks through the fog in my head, and I pull away. Things are complicated enough here at the Rosalie without adding whatever this is to the mix.
But August keeps his grip firm on my waist and searches my face. “What is it?”
Gently, I step as far back as I can in this tiny space. “I’m tired and maybe a little drunk, and possibly neither of us are making great decisions right now.”
August sighs and ruffles his hair. “You’re right. This is… yeah, this is not the time, and given the size of that bed, probably not the place.”
Turning, he picks up his glass from the table, throwing back the little bit of whiskey left, then sets the glass back down with a thump. “Listen,” he says. “If Edie didn’t just fall, if Lo was involved somehow, I promise you, we’ll get to the bottom of it, okay?”
“Okay,” I reply, my voice barely above a whisper.
He nods, then looks back at the table and gestures to the box. “Would it be all right with you if I borrowed these for awhile? I promise I’ll return them, I just want to see if there’s anything in here that might be good for the book.”
“Sure,” I say. I’m almost tempted to tell him not to bother bringing them back, that I don’t want to look at them anymore. It’s too painful to wonder why my mom kept something like this from me. To remind myself over and over again that I can wonder all I want, but she’ll never be able to explain herself to me.
He hefts the box into one arm and is turning to go when something occurs to me.
“What makes you think any of that stuff would help with the book?” I ask. “I mean, aren’t you just helping Lo write her memoir? Her version of what happened? Why would the stuff that was writtenabouther be relevant?”
A grimace takes over his face. “That’s the book she thinks we’re writing, yeah,” he says finally, and I see him pull the box a little tighter. “But I don’t know if that’s the bookI’mwriting anymore.”
One of the most interesting things about Lo—and one of the things I had a hard time believing was genuine when I first met her—was that there was zero bitterness in her. This was a woman who’d had her teenage diaries splashed all over America’s tabloids, a woman who basically had a scarlet “A” tattooed on her forehead for something that happened when she wasn’t even old enough to order her first drink. Sure, people also thought Landon Fitzroy was trash, the married man with a young bride at home and a mistress everywhere else, but death afforded him a dignity no one wanted to give Lo.
And when the attention faded away, what did she have? The money she was paid for her story ran out quickly, and she wasn’t educated, wasn’t skilled. She moved around, she tried her hand at acting in some epically terrible B movies, and she eventually ended up in the dreaded “Inland Empire” of California, working at a call center, paying too much rent for too small an apartment.
When I first reached out to her about working on a book, I’d expected her to be greedy and grasping, a trunk full of axes to grind at her feet.
I wouldn’t have blamed her for that.
But there was no malice in her for any of it—not for the scrutiny, not for the allegations and insinuations.
Not for Landon’s powerful family, who did everything in their power to destroy her in the wake of his death.
And, most intriguing to me, not for Landon himself.
You can see it in those diary entries theNational Enquirerpublished. She had honestly loved the guy.
In fact, when I went back and listened to our conversations for this book, all those hours and hours of talking, it was clear to me that not only had she loved Landon Fitzroy in1984, she was still in love with him in 2025. Never mind the various boyfriends she’d had over the decades since Landon’s death, never mind the husband she’d briefly picked up in the mid-nineties. Could Dave (who drove Gator boats in Louisiana) or Larry (who sold Buicks in Indiana) or Gary—also known as Skeeter, for reasons no one seems to know (who attempted some sort of “marijuana marshmallows” business in California)—ever hope to live up to the myth that was Landon Fitzroy?
To the outside world, Landon was a typical rich asshole with too much money and too few nos in his life. To her?
He was still her knight in shining armor.
He was still her savior.
He was still her Prince Fucking Charming.
He was [TK].
Listening to her talk about him, it was almost impossible to believe that she’d ever raise a hand to the man, much less kill him.
But there were plenty of people who thought she did, and the more time I spent with her, the more I began to think they might be right.
Pages of unfinished manuscript titled “Be a Good Girl: Lo Bailey, Landon Fitzroy, and the Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty.” Found among possessions of August Fletcher, 8/3/2025
CHAPTER TEN
July 26, 2025
