‘You’re so not OK with it,’ Adriana chides. ‘I’m your sister, I know you better than anyone. You miss him. I can tell. I just want you to be happy.’
Rose says nothing for a beat. She loves the way her sister worries about her but it’s a lost cause.
‘I miss being with someone who loved me the way he did, but I lied to him, Adriana, you know that.’
‘A lie of omission,’ her sister reminds her. ‘It was entirely understandable, Rose. I lied about it myself.’
‘But you didn’t reinvent yourself for the television,’ Rose reminds her. ‘Icreated a whole new person.’
‘Remember what you’ve always told me, what you wrote in your book,’ Adriana says. ‘Forgive yourself for what you had to do to survive.’
‘Should we have that embroidered on the bags in the gift shop?’ asks Rose wryly. ‘They’d be best sellers.’
The day that Rose meets Theo for the first time, she’s just spent part of the afternoon taping an ‘ask your therapist’ segment for a morning TV show. It’s the first time she’s ever done anything like this.
When she’s finished taping her segment, a twenty-
something assistant producer tells her that the show is never live with newbies because ‘Some people don’t spark on film.’
‘You were really good, though,’ the woman says as an afterthought as Rose leaves the set.
‘Thank you,’ says Rose, not believing a word of it.
In the dressing room, she takes off the grey linen trouser suit she decided to wear on camera and pulls on the pale-pink silk dress she’s wearing with strappy sandals to her friends’ dinner party later.
‘You’ll message me when it’s going to be on?’ Rose asks the young assistant producer before she leaves.
She might as well know precisely when she’s going to look dreadful on television instead of having all her friends phone her when it happens.
‘Sure, sure,’ says the woman.
Rose laughs to herself.
In LA, that’s code forNot a hope. You’re not important.
It takes Rose an hour to navigate the traffic to get to her friends Victor and Celeste’s house.
They’re landscape gardeners who love the theatre, cloud trees and entertaining.
The dinner party guests are in the garden when Rose arrives and, as usual, it’s an eclectic mix of people. A Swedish director whose garden they designed, the two lovely guys who run an art gallery in Santa Fe but are in town for an exhibition, Celeste’s two nieces, one of whom is trying to break into TV work and is nose to nose with the film director.
Victor’s daughter from his first marriage is there, along with their neighbour Liza and her twenty-something son who does something in tech. There’s also a man Rose doesn’t recognise.
He’s got curly dark hair with a hint of grey around his hairline, wears horn-rimmed glasses and a cream sweater that looks darned, and he’s laughing at something Victor’s saying.
He’s got a warm, clever face and Rose finds herself wondering where his significant other is.
‘Stop talking about terracing,’ says Celeste impatiently, pulling Rose in his direction. ‘Rose, you must meet Theo. He’s new in town and he’s single. He’s also a therapist! We’ve told him all about you.’
Rose flushes. Now he’ll think she’s a desperate single woman who forces her friends to matchmake on every occasion.
When Victor and Celeste finally leave them alone, Rose apologises.
‘I promise I didn’t ask Celeste to set me up,’ she says ruefully. ‘I am so sorry. A new single man in this neck of the woods gets the married people excited because they think there’s someone new for all their single friends. Normally, Celeste and Victor aren’t matchmakers but they appear to have lost the plot tonight.’
‘I don’t mind,’ says Theo. ‘I don’t mind at all. How about we make our hosts really happy by having a heart to heart?’
‘You’re very kind and gentlemanly,’ Rose says, smiling.
