She swept into the house before he had a chance to respond. He sat motionless, listening to the sink running in the kitchen, dishes clinking in the dishwasher, and, eventually, the front door slamming and the sound of her car driving away.
He knew as soon as he got up he would head right to his freshly stocked fridge, tear into a new case of beer, and pop open one of the bottles before it had even had a chance to get cold yet. He craved the peace it would bring, the uncomfortable feelings swirling inside him fizzling and fading into easily ignorable background noise.
Slowly, he pushed his chair back and made his way into the kitchen. He took a glass out of the cabinet and set it on the counter. He opened the fridge and stared at the unopened cases of beer neatly lined up across the bottom. Looking at the cases, all he could see was the revulsion and disappointment on Grey’s face the night of the premiere, when he had leaned over her in the car and she had smelled the booze on his breath.
It was barely eleven in the morning.
He hadn’t been to Johnny’s since the night he’d gotten the call from Audrey. Now that he was out and about again, he was getting more than his fill of contact with the outside world—plus, his anonymity was less of a guarantee than ever. Though he hadn’tofficially confirmed it, he was pretty sure getting publicly hammered would qualify as damage to Grey’s reputation.
But even so, maybe he’d been hitting it a little too hard at home lately. It couldn’t hurt to ease off for a day or two.
With a sigh, Ethan reached for his glass and filled it with water. He trudged to his bathroom and dropped two Alka-Seltzers into the glass, watching them disintegrate before chugging it down. It wasn’t a beer, but at least it was cold and carbonated. He felt the tension behind his eyes start to release as he opened the door to his office, settling behind his computer. He opened the document containing the last version of theBitter Pillscript, still untouched since Sam’s death.
He hesitated. Before he could let himself think twice, he was back at the fridge, carrying two cases of beer to unload into his office minifridge.For later,he rationalized as he knelt in front of it. He kept one bottle out and took it back to his desk with him. He left it sitting next to his computer, unopened, as he began to read. It would be his reward to himself once he made it through. Just one wouldn’t hurt.
Just one.
GREY’S LUNGS BURNED AND HERheart pounded. She inhaled through her nose and exhaled through her mouth, pumping her arms in time with the sound of her feet slapping the pavement. She spied the sign marking the spot where she had started her jog and willed her feet to keep going.Almost there.
She brought the edge of her tank top to her forehead, mopping up the sweat stinging her eyes. Some runs were harder than others, and today it felt like she was trudging through wet sand. It had been hours since breakfast, but the sandwich from that morning still felt like it was sitting like a stone in her stomach. That afternoon, she’d traversed the 2.2-mile loop around the Silver Lake Reservoir in a little over twenty minutes—not her best time, but not terrible. Once she hit her starting point again, she slowed to a walk, allowing herself a minute or two to breathe before she took another lap.
The Missy Elliott blaring through her headphones was abruptly interrupted by the sound of an incoming call. Grey pulledher phone out of her running pouch, snug around her hips, and checked the caller ID.
Mom.
Grey hadn’t been avoiding her mother, exactly; it was just a coincidence that they hadn’t spoken on the phone since she and Ethan had gone public. It wasn’t unusual for them to go a month or so without exchanging more than a sprinkling of texts. She knew her mother was itching for more details; even if Grey had had them, she was reluctant to provide them to her. Still, she couldn’t put it off forever.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Emily? Are you all right? Why do you sound like that?” Her mother’s voice sounded only vaguely concerned.
“I’m fine. I’m out running.”
“Is this a bad time?”
“No, it’s okay. What’s up?”
“Just calling to check in. Do you have any idea if you’ll be able to make it back home for Madison’s graduation?”
Grey had grown up in Port Chester, a working-class suburb of New York City. Her dad had been out of the picture for as long as she could remember. Her mother had worked as a receptionist in the city, her commute keeping her out of the house from dawn until well after dark. Once Grey started making money from acting, they were finally able to move into an apartment big enough for her mother to stop sleeping on the pull-out couch in the living room.
Shortly after Grey had moved cross-country for college, her mother had remarried: she’d fallen for a C-suite executive at her firm and decamped ten miles west to Scarsdale, into a sprawling house with more than enough bedrooms to spare. Her new husband had a daughter from a previous marriage, Madison, whom Grey had met fewer than five times over the past ten years.
“Um, maybe. My work schedule is really up in the air right now.”
“Oh, really? Did you book something?”
Grey winced. “Not yet. But I have some stuff coming up, maybe.” She’d repeated the lie so many times over the past few months that it had almost started to feel like the truth. She vowed to herself to text Renata as soon as she got off the phone: she couldn’t keep waiting around forGolden City. There had to be something else out there for her in the meantime.
“Well, even if you are working, I hope you find the time. You wouldn’t have to stay long, you could just fly in and out. Maybe your newfriendcan come with you.”
There it was. “Maybe. He’s pretty busy, too.”
“Look at you, you’ve finally gone Hollywood,” her mother said acidly.
For a brief moment, annoyance flared inside her:isn’t this what you wanted?But that was unfair. Her mother hadn’t asked her for a cent since she’d started dating her now-husband. And even when Grey was young, she had hardly been a nightmare stage mom. Unlike the moms of the other kids she always saw at auditions, whose only job was to cart their precious progeny from dance class to voice class to acting class, Grey’s mother had had neither the time nor the energy to take an active role in her career. Her older brother had accompanied her to auditions until she was old enough to take the Metro North into the city by herself.
She knew it was irrational to begrudge her mother for enabling Grey to follow her childhood dreams into an industry that she was still willingly involved in as an adult. Because as much as she wished she didn’t, as much as she despised the assorted bullshit that came with it, she really did love acting. From the first moment she’d stepped onstage at her kindergarten holiday pageant, there was no other road her life could have taken. She loved it, she wasbetter at it than anything else, and, at least for now, it was still paying her bills. She was one of the lucky ones.
