Talia cringes. “You looked horrified.”
“It was then that I realized I couldn’t escape my past,” I say.
Talia nods. “You shouldn’t have to hide yourself doing what you love. Just look at where we are. Yes, in this cemetery, but also Hollywood. People want so badly to be seen. It’s a completely fair thingto want. Maybe it’s time to lay Red String Girl to rest,” Talia says, glancing between the headstones dotting the green grass.
“May she rest in red.” I hold my hand over my heart.
“Are you going to enter your blue era now?” Talia jokes.
“With the NASA installation coming up and having just revealed my identity, I do have a chance to reinvent myself,” I tease.
Talia smiles. “I’m here with you every step of the way. And Jack will be, too. I still can’t get over that I was right about your trip. One bed. I knew it!”
I groan. “Like I said, we didn’t even spend the night together. I stayed in my own room. All night, every night.”
Talia throws her hand over her chest. “Did you hear that? It was the sound of my heart breaking. I’m here for Jooney. At least tell me that the kissing was everything you remembered it would be?”
I pull at dry blades of grass in silence.
“Wait, was it worse? Because when I look at Jack, I don’t think bad kisser,” Talia says.
“I almost told him I loved him last night,” I blurt out. “After we almost kissed… again.”
Talia’s eyes pop. “You love him? I thought we were processing Red String Girl. Let me take a minute to process this now, too.” She presses her fingers to her temples. “You’ve never loved anyone. Except me of course. You’ll always love me.”
I laugh. “Always.”
“Do you think he’s your… stringmate?” she asks in a whisper, as though we might be overheard in a cemetery.
“I want to believe that he is.” In the daylight, after the rush of love and the adrenaline high, things look a little bit clearer. “It’s weird, though. We kissed in the Rocket Garden, but since then, anytime we’re about to kiss, we’ve been interrupted. Kenneth in the hotel room. The police last night. I can’t help but wonder what it means.”
Talia scrunches her eyebrows. “I don’t know. Bad timing? Pick better places to make out?”
“Maybe what we’re running into are knots,” I say. “Because we’re not supposed to kiss or be more than friends. Who knows where I’ll be when the residency is over. I can’t make promises to Jack if I don’t know where I’ll be, and it’s not like he can just come with me. His mission is very specific, and it’s based here.”
“Do you have to go into it thinking it’s forever? What if it was another chapter? Like Red String Girl was,” Talia says.
I can’t stand the thought of Jack only being a chapter in my life. I could barely accept it after one night with him, but if I leave, aren’t I doing what his parents did? I just claimed my name. If I’m lucky, my work will take me all over the world.
Talia wraps her arm around my shoulders. “If anything, your beliefs have led you this far in love and work,” she says. “Why lose sight of them now?”
Chapter 27
JACK
It’s her smile that catches my attention first. Sticking halfway out of my mailbox is today’s issue of theLos Angeles Times. I pull the paper out so fast that it drags the rest of the mail in my box with it and onto the ground.
There it is. Rooney isn’t featured in the Arts section. She’s on the front page of the entire thing. A photo of her in a circle next to a larger photo of the sign. Rooney’s name is in the headline.
Moments from that night come back to me. Particularly the one of us almost kissing again. And the way she sacrificed herself for the team.
I grab my mail off the ground, momentarily distracted by purple telescope stamps in the corner of a small envelope. I have a hunch about who sent this. The return address confirms that it’s from my parents, who have been in northern Chile for two months for work.
I’m meeting Rooney at Talia’s gallery in twenty minutes so that we can finally have a conversation about us. There’s no time right now for what the contents of this envelope might hold. I stuff it into my back pocket.
The drive to the gallery is surprisingly quick, I find parking one block away, and there was still an hour left on the meter from the previous car. The streak of good luck makes me, for a second, start thinking Rooney-like thoughts.
I haven’t seen Rooney since the wrapping last Friday. She’s been inundated with interview and commission requests. I also haven’t spoken to my parents. I wonder if they’ve heard about the Hollywood Sign yet. Or if they remember that this artist is who I’m working with. Rooney taking sole responsibility helped Team Hollywood. No one has suspected us. At least not to our faces.
