Hunting her down.
Stall everyone, okay?
Yes!I typed back quickly.
I needed to get back to the media room so I could greet the journalists and show them to their seats. I’d be extra friendly, apologize profusely for the delay, and make sure everybody stayed put until Fiona Pills arrived. I could handle this.
Still, I realized the opportunity. Harper would have the answer to one of my burning questions.
“Your boss seriously thinks he’s going to sell Ben’s screenplay?” I sounded so doubtful, I felt terrible. “I mean, he’s tried for so long, and I worry about him, you know?”
Harper bobbed her head up and down, because nodding like a normal person wasn’t enough.
“He thinks it’s going to go fora lotof money.” Her eyes opened wide. “Like,a lot. There could be a bidding war. This is going to be his big breakthrough. So exciting!”
I gulped. I should have been happy, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around this. Was I a shitty girlfriend who couldn’t see the extent of his genius? Was it my fault he hadn’t succeeded earlier because I hadn’t put all my trust in him?
“That’s great,” I managed to say, eventually.
“You’ve read it, right?”
Did I hear a bite in her tone? Could she sense my doubts?
“Of course I did.”
I’d readallof Ben’s work. But come to think of it, Ben hadn’t mentioned which of his masterpieces he’d shared with Harper. Usually I got the blow-by-blow of every email, rejection, and heartache he encountered. But I’d been so busy the last few days, there had been no time for that.
“It’s the one about the hitmen who need to kill each other, with the sci-fi twist,” I said, a little miffed.
Harper’s pretty little face turned into a frown. “Um, no. It’s about a vengeful mistress who kills her lover? And then does whatever she can to make him look alive to the rest of the world?”
“WHAT?”
Harper was oblivious to the shock in my voice.
“It’ssogood! The part where she moves his body to her house… You can feel the physical exhaustion like you were there yourself dragging it. The writing issuperb.”
“What are you talking about?”
I no longer cared about pretending to be friendly.
“He said he just came up with the idea like that.” She snapped her fingers. “And wrote it in, like, a week. It’s the best part of my job, hearingthe stories of how great art is created.”
Except that wasn’t Ben’s story. That was mine. The screenplay she was describing was the oneI’dwritten. The one I’d emailed to Carmen’s producer friends. Ben must have somehow found it on my computer. I never worked on the screenplay when he was home, and I always closed the file in between sessions, but my laptop was frequently lying around the apartment, left open on the dining table or the couch. The fucker had stolen my work and passed it off as his.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Carmen’s icy tone cut through the air.
Harper froze. I whipped around to see my boss, more red-faced than ever.
We all know what happened next. The press conference started thirty minutes late, with the few people who’d bothered to stick around, because I hadn’t been there to keep them waiting. Fiona Pills never showed up. I was so flustered I forgot to remove the empty chair next to Odetta Olson. Never had a piece of plastic furniture spoken so loudly about the rift between two women. Odetta Olson, the veteran Hollywood figure who’d done a hundred press conferences in her career, had fumbled so badly through some of her responses that replays of her answers had gone viral within hours.
It was a disaster of epic proportions.
Pull-Gate would never die now.
But my stealing asshole of a boyfriend might.
Cannes Film FestivalDay Thirteen
