Taylor opened his mouth to speak, but Saffi’s glare cut him off. That hadn’t been enough for Andino, though, because he answered, “We were just discussing Hector Olsen’s trial.”
Dimple’s attention snapped to Saffi, but only for a moment before darting away. “But I remember seeing him at the police station. Is he not already under arrest?”
“Was that before or after he accused you of framing him?” Saffi muttered. The twitch of Dimple’s mouth revealed that she’d heard her.
“It’s more complicated than that,” Taylor explained. “He paid his bail, so now we’ll just have to wait until the trial, which has been delayed indefinitely.”
“That doesn’t sound very just,” Dimple said with a frown. Her voice trembled ever so slightly, glancing around as though terrified Olsen would pop out at her from behind a closed door.
Saffi could tell Taylor was carefully studying Dimple for signs of dishonesty, visibly distressed when he found none. He probably felt like hewaslosing his mind. She couldn’t blame him. Even Saffi struggled with it and she’d known Dimple to be a liar from the very moment she met her.
“I know,” Andino huffed. “We don’t get paid until the trial’s concluded.”
Saffi frowned. “Is that seriously your only concern?”
Andino rolled his eyes. “Don’t tell me you’ve grown soft, Saffi. At the end of the day, this is my job.”
Saffi didn’t know why his nonchalance irked her so much. She’d witnessed Andino’s lackluster attitude the entire time she’d been in America. Hell, him being impatient to the point of negligence was the whole reason Saffi had been called to help. He never failed to bring up her past failures but came so close every day to making the same mistakes she had. And she was the one cleaning up his mess while he remained blissfully unaware. Maybe she should just let him fuck up the case, let him see what it’s like.
Dimple was watching their back-and-forth very intently.
“Whatareyou doing here?” Saffi asked.
If Dimple was annoyed that her reconnaissance had been cut short, she didn’t show it. Saffi really should’ve known that something as simple as a change in subject wouldn’t be the end of it. “The trailer forInsomniacame out today,” she said. “Have you seen it yet?”
Saffi and Taylor shook their heads, but Andino remained suspiciously unmoved. She’d almost forgotten that Dimple’s movie was due to come out soon. September, they’d said. That was only a month away.
Dimple graciously accepted the remote handed to her by Andino and clicked a practiced series of buttons. The TV in the corner of the room that Andino and Taylor usually set to the most ridiculous channels imaginable suddenly went dark. Chilling music washed across the room. Saffi turned to Dimple, suddenly eager to compare the woman on-screen to the one beside her, but Dimple pinched her in a pointed demand to pay attention. Once Saffi looked up, though, she couldn’t look away.
There was no other way to describe it—the woman on-screen was beautiful. She was caked in dirt and blood with the most twisted, demented grin on her face, and she’d somehow never looked better. Saffi wasn’t one to subscribe to the concept of fate, nor to the notion that a person could be born to do something, but as she watched Dimple’s face flash across the screen, Saffi got the distinct impression that Dimple was always meant to do this. To be put on screensand billboards. To carve out space for herself in this godforsaken world, damn anyone who stood in her path.
Suddenly, it all clicked—everything Saffi had scoffed at about actors and the film industry. When it culminated in projects like these, it made sense why so much time, effort, and money were put into them.
Distantly, Saffi realized there had been a conscious and wise effort to leave Chris Porter out of the trailer. But that only meant Dimple got double the screen time.
By the time the TV faded to black once again, every hair on Saffi’s body was standing on end. If she thought about it for more than half a second, she would realize that she had virtually no understanding of the plot. Somehow, she didn’t want to linger on that.
“That was incredible,” Taylor said in that easy, genuine tone of his. “You’re very talented, Dimple.”
“It’s been trending,” Andino muttered, attempting to sound casual.
“Has it?” Dimple asked as though she didn’t already know. “It’s been selected for the Toronto International Film Festival next month as well.”
But there was something odd in her tone, so Saffi turned to face her. When their eyes met, all the breath left Saffi’s lungs at once. This entire time, it was clear that Dimple had been looking only at her. Her expression was like nothing Saffi had ever seen before—guarded, like a soldier preparing to be struck down, but also eager. For some godforsaken reason, despite critical acclaim and thousands of fans falling at her feet, Dimple Kapoor wanted Saffi’s opinion.
She cleared her throat. “Not bad,” she said. Dimple relaxed at that, her shoulders unwinding.
Privately, however, Saffi still thought the trailer felt subpar when measured up against the performance Dimple had been putting on these past months. The one-woman show Saffi had front seat tickets to. She supposed she should feel lucky.
—
Almost two weekslater, after running into dead end after dead end, Saffi had come to realize that the biggest gap in her evidence was that Dimple herself had been a victim. But the best way to catch a liar was to allow them to incriminate themself. If Saffi could somehow prove that Dimple had lied about Hector attacking her, she would have a shot at convincing a jury.
She’d been in the middle of digging through her bag for a clean shirt when her office door burst open. Taylor came rushing inside—never a good sign.
“What is it?”
He didn’t speak right away, watching as Saffi turned her duffel bag upside down, shaking the contents free. All of her worldly possessions spread out across the floor. She was constantly moving from one hotel to another so she had no permanent address, but seeing the small amount of floor space her few possessions seemed to take up was a little jarring. Saffi dug through the mess on the ground until she finally found a plain white button-down without any stains on it—her last one. She would have to walk over to the laundromat soon.
