“I don’t think so,” said Jason, studying her, eyes narrowing. “There must be more to it than that.”
“Did you say anything else, Julia?” Nigel prompted, brow furrowing. “Anything Deneford perhaps misinterpreted?”
“Well—” Julia took a deep breath and clasped her hands to try to still their trembling. “I told him that unless he waited until we were on hiatus, Paige wouldn’t be available.”
“But that’s not even true,” Louis protested, as Paige stared at Julia, stricken and speechless. “Why would you tell him that?”
“He said he heard thatPatchworkwas canceled. I told him ithadn’t been, that nothing was official yet, that we’ll begin shooting season six in January, and I expect another season or two to follow. And Paige—” Julia threw her a pleading look, but Paige looked away, shaking her head slowly as if trapped in a bad dream. “Paige will probably become a season regular. We’ll need her.”
“Oh, Julia,” said Nigel. “What have you done?”
“I specifically told Deneford that he should talk to Paige and her agent,” Julia hastened to add. “In fact, as soon as we hung up, I realized I had probably spoken out of turn, so I called him back.”
“What did he say?” Edna asked.
“He didn’t pick up. I left a voicemail.”
“Oh, fantastic,” said Olivia, folding her arms. “Problem solved.”
“Let’s all take a breath,” Lindsay pleaded, raising her hands for calm. “I’m sure Julia didn’t mean for any of this to happen. It can’t be too late to fix it.”
“Itistoo late,” said Paige. They all turned to look at her. “My agent said they already offered the role to someone else.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Julia. “I truly am.”
“You’resorry?” Paige fixed her with a look somewhere between astonishment and fury. “Your careless, self-interested comments about what I’m like to work with—as if you’d know—cost me a potentially breakthrough role. I know you don’t wantA Patchwork Lifeto end, but really, Miss Julia? To sabotage my career to save it? Was it really worth that much to you?”
“You have every right to be upset,” said Julia, a tremor in her voice. “I didn’t mean to sabotage anything. I’ll do whatever I can to make amends, I promise.”
Paige regarded her skeptically, tears filling her eyes. “Forgive me if I don’t believe a word you say. I trusted you. I admired you.” She gestured to the next table over. “Just this morning you sat in that chair and told me a story about how you met your late husband after missing out on a role. I thought you were so kind, encouraging me tofind hope in adversity or whatever, but the whole time, you knew it was your fault that I didn’t get the part.”
Julia found herself with absolutely nothing to say. She couldn’t justify what she had done, and her apologies and explanations were offering Paige no comfort. Her friends and colleagues were looking at her as if they didn’t recognize her anymore, as if they were reconsidering whether they had ever truly known her. She endured it as long as she could, hoping the words that would make everything right would come to her. When they didn’t, she took a deep, shaky breath, bowed her head in acceptance of their judgment, turned, and walked away.
“Julia, wait,” Lindsay called after her, but she kept going.
She went upstairs to her suite, where she closed the door and stood in the middle of the room, wondering what to do next. After a long moment, she switched on her computer and emailed the Cross-Country Quilters. “Grace and Megan were right,” she typed. “My scheme to keep the cast and crew ofA Patchwork Lifetogether has failed spectacularly. I should have accepted their decision to leave the show and moved forward with dignity and hope. I think that’s how Grace put it. Now I’ve lost my series and my work family, and I have no one to blame but myself.”
She hit send and waited to see if anyone would respond. Then a horrible thought seized her: Perhaps the Cross-Country quilters too would judge her harshly. Quickly she closed her computer. That really would be more than she could bear.
She went to the window and gazed outside at a perfect late-autumn afternoon, reminding her suddenly, intensely, of her Iowa childhood. The corn harvest would have been completed by now, unless it had been an unusually cool summer. She and her mother would have been bringing in the winter squash and root vegetables and putting up preserves. As winter approached, the Merchaud family and their neighbors would have been giving thanks for a bountiful season, unless it had been a bad year, in which case they would havebeen worrying over how to pay the bills and put food on the table after losing the crops to drought, floods, or pests.
It was little wonder Julia had longed to escape into the world of the theater, where she could be anyone, doing and saying things she would never dare in ordinary life, and be applauded for it. At first her parents had found her passion for acting puzzling, but as long as she did her chores and kept her grades up, they had allowed her to participate in her high school drama club. It was a good way for Julia to get involved and make friends, and they were proud, in their understated way, when their own friends and neighbors praised their talented daughter. When Julia announced her intention to major in theater in college, they insisted that she add a second major in education. They dutifully attended most of her college shows, reassuring each other that she would come to her senses eventually and focus on earning her teaching credentials, if they kept praying for it.
That didn’t happen, of course, but although they were obviously disappointed, Julia had assumed that they still tuned in to her television shows every week. Then, years later, while they were washing dishes after Thanksgiving dinner, one of her sisters-in-law let slip that her mother had stopped watchingFamily Treeafter an episode in which Julia’s character’s eldest son cheated on his wife. “She said the stories had gotten ‘too racy,’?” her sister-in-law confided, giggling, until she saw Julia’s expression and fell into an embarrassed silence.
Her parents had never visited her in California. Even after her career took off and she had been able to afford to charter a private jet for them, they had politely declined her invitations. They had always welcomed her home, though, and they had adored Charles. Surely that meant Julia hadn’t been a complete disappointment, although—
She gave her head a shake to clear it. How odd to be brooding about the past when the problems of that very day were more than enough to deal with.
Throwing on the warmest coat she had packed, really no more than a heavy jacket, Julia put on her hiking shoes, quietly openedher door, and peered into the hallway. Only after confirming no one was around did she leave her room. As she descended the grand oak staircase, she heard distant voices from the ballroom, but thankfully, no one was in sight.
Crossing the foyer, she entered the west wing, but instead of turning left toward the kitchen, she continued straight ahead, past the parlor and the guest rooms to the corridor’s end at the side door, which had been the main entrance to the original farmhouse a century ago and now led to the cornerstone patio. The leaves had fallen from the lilac hedges, and not even the smallest green shoot remained of the perennials that had bloomed so lushly throughout the spring and summer, but the barrenness made the large, gray cornerstone with its engraved “Bergstrom 1858” more prominent, the better to evoke the manor’s storied history.
Julia passed through the shrubbery arch and stepped onto a gravel path that meandered through a dense grove of elm, sugar maple, and evergreen. A few yellow-gold and burnt-orange leaves clung to the boughs overhead, but most were scattered upon the ground and crunched underfoot in the dappled sunlight that filtered through the branches.
Eventually the path led Julia to the north gardens. In the center of an oval clearing, which was paved in the same gray stone as the cornerstone patio, stood a black marble fountain of a mare prancing with two foals, reminiscent of the rearing stallion in the center of the circular driveway in front of the manor. The water was turned off, and likely had been since before the first frost, but in summer the sound of the water was lovely, and a light spray caught on a whimsical breeze could be quite refreshing. Four large planters were spaced evenly around the fountain, the lower halves of their walls two feet wider than at the top, forming smooth, polished seats where visitors could rest and admire the chrysanthemums, sedum, purple coneflowers, and black-eyed Susans that had bloomed in season amid decorative grasses. On the other side of the fountain was a gazebo, and throughits white wooden posts and gingerbread molding, Julia glimpsed terraces cut into the slope of a gentle hill, filled with rosebushes, English ivy, maiden grass, and asters, or rather, what remained of them.
How lush and fragrant and lovely the north gardens had been when Julia and the Cross-Country Quilters had visited them during their summertime reunion at the manor a few months before. Now, in the second week of November, only the English ivy remained as verdant and green as Julia remembered. The rosebushes had been pruned back. The brown grasses rustled tiredly in the breeze, as if resigned to the likelihood that the first significant snowfall would flatten them. Some dried, browned flowers remained of the sedum, black-eyed Susans, and chrysanthemums, their charming, bright colors only a memory. The purple coneflowers too had faded, but browned cones remained atop the stalks, perhaps left by the gardeners to feed the birds.
