Ben caught the look in my eye, and I finally saw a glimmer of understanding.
He swallowed. “Right, well, same. I’m here to make connections.”
Harper opened her arms wide and laughed. “Ta-da!”
I didn’t find it funny.
But I should have. I should have wanted to make Ben happy because he made me happier than I ever thought I deserved to be. Especially after my parents’ ugly divorce—when I was fourteen—sent my mom and me off to that moldy apartment an hour away from all my friends. With my brothers gone, I was the one left to deal with her incurable sadness, when it wasn’t rage at my dad’s new girlfriend. I was the one who had to fill up the fridge and clean the house because Mom worked twice as hard to patch together an income. She acted like she was the only one crushed under the loneliness of having lost all the family she had. But I was there, crying myself to sleep more nights than not.
“No, but seriously,” Harper said now. “When Ben told me about his screenplay, I couldn’twaitto read it. Ibeggedhim to email it immediately.”
She giggled as she glanced at Ben, who was suddenly studying his empty glass.
“You’re being too nice,” he said, all flustered. “And Marnie has to go.”
“Are you alwaysthismodest?” Harper said, playfully smacking his hand. She looked at me. “Is he always like this?”
I was confused and trying hard to hide it. Ben had submitted his work to endless competitions and fellowships over the years. He’d pitched agents, the odd producers he managed to meet. It never went anywhere. And on his first day in Cannes, he’d somehow impressed a big agent’s assistant to the point of having lunch with her?
“Well, it’s incredible,” Harper said, giggling like a hyena, or what I thought a hyena might sound like. “I’m sharing it with my boss and I already know he’s going toloveit.”
“Stop it,” Ben said teasingly, but there was an edge to his voice.
“You’re going to be a very successful screenwriter,” Harper continued, oblivious.
Questions piled up in my head. Why wasn’t Ben jumping with joy? Why hadn’t he rushed to tell me, even if just over text? Why was he avoiding looking at me?
I wish I could say that I started to put the pieces together then, that I could pretend to have an inkling of what was going on right under my nose. But that was the problem with being in love. Just like I had once believed that Ben was a brilliant writer, I was also convinced he was a fantastic boyfriend who would never try to hurt me.
Even if I’d done something that would shatter him in a million pieces.
And no, I’m not talking about keeping Carmen’s contacts from him.
That wasn’t the first time I’d betrayed my boyfriend.
What I did to Ben was so much worse than that.
The Girls
We never expected it to be easy.
That damn ladder stared us each in the face, and we always knew we’dhave to clamber up inch by inch. We were prepared for that. We would try and try again. For a moment, it all felt very possible. Cannes made it seem that way, with its endless rumble of fame, dripping diamonds at breakfast, champagne spilling from crystal towers, and billionaires’ yachts dominating the marina. We were there. We had made it there, at least.
And yet we were still so far away.
It matters to us that you understand this: We never wanted anybody to get hurt.
We came with the best of intentions.
So maybe we lost our minds a little bit.
Maybe we were blinded by the lights.
But we are not criminals.
We only did what we had to do.
If the show was going to go on, we’d be sitting front row.
