“There,” Eileen says, stepping back with a nod of approval. “Perfect.”
“Listen carefully now,” She grips my shoulders, her eyes—the color of a stormy Irish Sea—drilling into mine. “When you leave this room, turn left. Go to the end of the hall and take the service stairs—not the main ones, the service stairs on the right. There’s a door marked ‘Staff Only.’ They’ll take you down to the kitchen level. Walk straight through the kitchen like you belong there. No one will stop you if you walk with purpose. The service entrance is at the back, past the walk-in coolers. George will be parked just outside in the limo. The paparazzi won’t be on that side—they’re all out front waiting for you to walk down the aisle.”
She presses the canvas tote—my entire life, condensed into ten pounds of cotton—into my chest. “Now, Annie. You need to go right now before your mother and her entourage comes back.”
“Butwheredo I go?” The words are a strangled sob. “I don’t even have a map! I don’t have a plan!”
She cups my face. “Where have you always dreamed of going, love? Deep down, where’s that place that pulls at you?”
I don’t hesitate. “New York City.”
The answer comes automatically, something I’ve known since I was eight and visited for the first time with my parents while my father was meeting with studio executives. I spent three days wandering around Manhattan with Eileen while they were in meetings—walking through Central Park, buying hotdogs from street vendors, sitting in a coffee shop in the Village and watching people for hours. I loved the energy of it, the anonymity, how you could be anyone or no one at all. I’ve dreamed about it for years but never let myself say it out loud because my life was always supposed to be here, in California, in the house my parents chose, doing what Colliers do.
“Then New York City it is,” she says. She taps her finger against my heart, then my temple. “You’ve got the heart for it, and God knows you’ve got the brain. You’re more clever than all of them, Annie. Don’t you ever let them convince you otherwise.”
And then I see it. A single tear tracking through the wrinkles at the corner of her eye.
Eileen Murphy has been a constant in my life since I was three years old, and in all that time, through every hard thing, I have never once seen her cry. Not at her husband’s funeral when she stood stone-faced in a black dress while her daughters wept into their handkerchiefs. Not when her mother died and she had to fly back to Galway to bury her. I’ve seen her hold me steady through broken bones and broken hearts.
She doesn’t cry, not ever. But she’s crying now—real tears are sliding down her cheeks, and they’re for me.
Because I’m leaving. Because this is goodbye.
She kisses both my cheeks—the scent of her lavender perfume imprinted on my skin—and smiles through the dampness of her tears. “We had a grand time, didn’t we, mo chuisle?”
I’m sobbing now but I’m smiling, too, the emotions a beautiful, tangled knot. “We did. The absolute best, a chara.”
And we really did. Eileen took me to the Santa Monica Pier when I was little and let me ride the carousel over and over until I knew every horse by heart—the white one with the blue saddle was my favorite. She bought me candy apples that made my teeth stick together and had to be eaten in careful bites. She tookme to Griffith Observatory on Saturday afternoons when my parents were at cocktail parties or working late, and we’d look at the stars through the big telescope and she’d tell me stories about constellations her grandmother taught her back in County Clare. We had picnics at Runyon Canyon with sandwiches she made that morning—turkey and Swiss on sourdough, always cut diagonally because she knew I liked them that way. We baked Irish soda bread in our kitchen that never turned out quite right, too dense or too dry, but we ate it anyway with squares of butter melting into the warm centers. She let me help her in the garden, digging in the dirt until my fingernails were black and my knees were grass-stained and my mother complained for days about the state of my clothes. Every June she took me to the beach for my birthday, just the two of us, and she’d pack egg salad sandwiches and tart lemonade in a cooler. We’d stay until the lifeguards went home and the beach was empty except for us and the seagulls, the sun a clementine sinking into the ocean.
“It’s been the honor of my days, loving you like my own.” She presses one last kiss to my forehead, holding there a beat too long, and I try to memorize everything about this—the tenderness of her hands, the sound of her voice. “The greatest adventure.”
Then she’s moving to the door, opening it carefully, just a crack. Her head swivels as she checks the hallway like a seasoned spy. She looks back at me and nods once. “Now! Run, Annie. And for the love of God, don’t look back!”
I clutch the tote to my heart and I run.
I slip into the hallway and turn left. My Keds are silent on the plush carpet. Past the gilded sconces, the potted orchids, the distant murmur of the string quartet. The “Staff Only” door is an unassuming slab of gray in a world of cream and gold. I push through.
The stairwell is concrete and fluorescent-lit, nothing like the elegant hallways upstairs. My footsteps echo as I take the stairs two at a time, one hand on the railing, the other gripping the tote. Down one flight, then another. The door at the bottom opens into a bright, hot kitchen that smells like garlic and roasting meat.
No one looks at me.
I stride through, chin up, with purpose in every step, just like Eileen said. Past the line cooks in their white jackets, past the prep stations covered in vegetables, past a woman piping frosting onto what must be my wedding cake—five tiers of white fondant with sugar flowers. I don’t stop. I keep walking, past the industrial dishwashers and the walk-in coolers, straight to the back door that saysEmergency Exit Only.
I push it open and step out into the late August heat.
George is there. He’s standing by the black limo, his face breaking into a grin that says I’ve been waiting twenty years for this. “There’s my getaway girl,” he says, opening the back door with a flourish. “Your chariot awaits.”
I slide in, the leather cool against my skin as he seals me away. Through tinted glass, the postcard-pretty prison that is the Bel-Air Bay Club shrinks—the big, white tent a distant sail, the flowers already wilting in the sun, three hundred lives paused for a show that won’t go on.
And I keep my promise to Eileen. I don’t look back.
Not once.
Chapter 1
ANNIE
The inside of the taxi smells like a cocktail of stale espressos, a thousand Parliament cigarettes, and a pine-scented air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror—an embedded funk that clings to your clothes and makes you wonder if you’ll ever smell like a normal human again. I’ve been parked here for a solid two minutes, staring out the grimy window at what is, apparently, my new home sweet home. And let me tell you, it’s not exactly screamingwelcome to your fresh start, Annie.
