He worried for her reputation, meanwhile she was aligned with the reputation-be-damned producers and her agent.
‘You’re so good at what you do but not this way,’ Theo had said. ‘It frightens me because it’s changing you too. Rose,’ he’d pleaded. ‘You’d never have countenanced this sort of high-speed therapy when we first met. The show has moved on so much since you started it and it’s become unsustainable. It’s not you, please be careful before it all goes up in flames,’ he’d begged.
‘I can’t leave, not yet,’ Rose had insisted. ‘I know the buzz is addictive but Iamhelping people—’
‘It will implode,’ he’d interrupted wearily. ‘I don’t know how it hasn’t already, Rosie, honey. This is changing you. You’re becoming someone for whom it’s all about the ratings. That’s not you.’
She’d chosen not to listen to him. She loved the buzz of television, couldn’t explain that, for a kid who’d come from nothing, this success was the ultimate validation. But then, Theo didn’t know where she’d really come from.
All he knew was what she told everyone: childhood in the Auvergne with parents who’d travelled a lot and were now dead. A terrible house fire had burned all her childhood photos. The perfect cover story in these privacy-less times.
She’d chosen France because the French privacy laws were much stricter and harsher than UK ones. Rose had been interviewed about her so-called peripatetic childhood.
‘We moved so much, I think that has helped me understand other people’s problems: that’s why I can be devil’s advocate on the show.’
She was rarely on social media and was never photographed in anything other than her work outfits with her beautifully styled chestnut hair.
Amazingly, it had worked. Except that Theo also believed it. There was almost no way Rose could tell him the truth now.
‘It’s my fault for thinking you agreed with me,’ he said.
‘I do and I don’t,’ Rose replied, torn. ‘You don’t understand, Theo—’
‘No.’ He held a hand up. ‘I understand, it’s your career and you get to make the decisions surrounding it. I would never stand in your way, Rose. I worry, but I won’t any more. It’s fine, you do what you think is right.’
For most people, it would hardly have registered as an argument.
For them, it was like the Cold War.
Rose has gone over that night endlessly in her head.
If only she’d reacted differently. If only she’d stopped for a moment and asked herself if she was protected in case of a disaster. If only Theo knew about her childhood, he might understand her desperate need for acceptance.
But she hadn’t told him about her past, she’d let her anger and ego take over.
He was trying to control her, she’d decided furiously.
In the morning, Rose had barely spoken.
They were both off, had planned to swim later in the day.
But there was no swimming. Instead, Theo had stood looking at Rose, in his threadbare jeans and old striped collarless shirt, bare feet from being out on the deck of their Carmel home high above the Pacific.
His dark eyes had shone with worry through his horn-rimmed glasses and, for once, the man whose face was always wreathed with a smile when he looked at Rose was grave.
‘Do you still feel the same way?’ he asked cautiously.
‘It’s my show, I can do good, Theo, you know I can,’ Rose had said.
If she could just convince Theo thatThe Talisman Effectwasn’t going the way of all TV shows, to hell in a handbasket.
The following morning, he was gone.
Pride stopped Rose from contacting him.
He was right; she knew it.
‘Can we do a segment called “Fix It in Fifteen”?’ one of the producers had asked only the other day. ‘I can see it: a mini part of the show in between the actual family you’re working with. Show them, discuss their problems, then cut to fix-it-in-fifteen, then back to the original family. You think?’
