Instead, I just feel tired.
“When does filming start?”
“That’s the best part. They want you immediately. As soon as the European press tour wraps, we’ll fly out directly for principal photography.”
So not even a small break. No breathing room. Just one obligation bleeding into the next, an endless chain of commitments that leaves no space for anything resembling an actual life.
“Who’s directing?” I ask, mostly to buy myself time to process.
Victoria’s answer comes almost too casually. Like she’s been rehearsing how to deliver this particular piece of information.
“Laurence Starling.”
My vision tunnels. The kitchen, the morning light, Mabie’s concerned face, all of it fades to white noise as blood rushes in my ears.
Laurence Starling.
The man who locked me in a hotel room when I was seventeen. The man whose brand of cologne still makes me gag ten years later if I smell it on anyone else. The man I’ve spent my entire adult life avoiding, dodging, maneuvering around like he’s a landmine buried in the landscape of my career.
And Victoria just casually drops his name like it means nothing. Like he’s just another director. Like she doesn’t know exactly what he did.
I’m going to be sick.
Mabie appears at my elbow, close but not touching, her face creased with concern. Something on my face must really concern her because she silently mouthsyou okay?
I give the weakest possible nod, my hand white-knuckling around my phone. “You can’t be serious.”
Victoria gives a long suffering sigh. “This is the price of being taken seriously, Phoenix. You need to learn how to rise above the noise.”
A hundred possible responses crash through my mind. Screaming. Crying. Telling her exactly what I think of her, what I’ve always thought of her, every bitter resentment I’ve swallowed for the past two decades.
But my throat has closed up entirely. No words will come.
Victoria fills the silence with more talking, because Victoria always fills silence with more talking.
“Anyway, I still need to run out and find something appropriate to wear for the press tour kickoff. You’d think they would provide wardrobe for the mother of the star, but apparently that’s too much to ask. I’ll see you in Paris.”
The line goes dead.
It takes a few seconds for me to pull the phone away from my ear and look at the screen, not quite believing she ended the call so abruptly despite the evidence right in front of my face.
Mabie’s hand hovers near my shoulder, not quite touching, the way someone might approach a bird they’re afraid of startling into flight.
“I know we literally just met,” she says quietly. “And you absolutely don’t have to tell me anything. But you look like a kid who just found out Santa Claus isn’t real.”
I set the phone face-down on the counter. My fingers leave damp prints on the case.
For a long moment I just stand there, staring at the peeling wallpaper on the wall behind the stove.
“My mother is also my manager,” I hear myself say. “She just signed me up for a three-picture franchise without asking me. Directed by someone I…someone who she knows has hurt me very badly in the past.”
“Sounds like you should fire her,” Mabie declares. Her eyes go wide a second later, like she didn’t mean to say it so bluntly. “Oh God. I’m sorry. That was…she’s yourmom, I get it—I mean, it’s not my place to—actually, you know what, I said what I said. You shouldn’t have to let anyone treat you like that. I loved my mom, but I would be so done if it were me. Fire her. That’s all I’ll say about it.”
Mabie clamps her mouth shut, miming the action of locking it with a key.
Fire her.
Two words. So simple that a twenty-one-year-old who’s known me for less than a week can see the obvious answer that I’ve been too tangled up in guilt and obligation to reach for myself.
