A cold wind bites at her bare ankles. Quinn was always her dad’s biggest advocate.“He doesn’t want to go,”she told Joey once about rehab, while they sat hip-to-hip in the cafeteria, sharing a bag of vending machine pretzels. Joey had the acute awareness back then that Quinn didn’t talk about her dad to everyone. She was compassionate, empathetic to a fault, but she was also a teenager. The day Tom rolled his truck into a streetlight and puked onto the sidewalk was one that Joey would never forget. She wonders if that day, the public humiliation of it, was the turning point. It was right around then, Joey realizes, that Quinn started acting strangely. The lies began. The sneaking out. The avoidance. They were all close—Joey and Elena and Sophie—but Quinn was like a mother duck. She kept them all together, and after she dipped out of their friendship, they never unified. If they had, they would have had enough awareness to convince her to come back to them or force her to tell them what was going on. But they didn’t. And then Joey made a choice on Quinn’s last day that would haunt her forever. To make a stupid, insignificant point, as if their friendship meant nothing to her at all, she chose a boy. She chose River over Quinn.
Joey is starting to feel cold. Spent. She wishes she didn’t have to run back down. Waiting for her down there is a decision she doesn’t want to make, a conversation she doesn’t want to have.
Quinn died that day, and Joey never got the telling off she deserved. There has been no punishment for her but the slow decay of guilt. Andguilt is a pillar holding up her grief. It’s why she will never be able to let go of Quinn’s death.
A sudden sound from behind her shakes her out of her reverie. The rev of an engine. A dirt bike, maybe, from somewhere down the mountain, but still close. It’s after eight. Usually, she has the whole mountain to herself at this time of night. She sits perfectly still, listening as it seems to approach slowly. All her muscles tense. She prepares to stand, to run. And then, just as she’s about to launch to her feet, the sound fades and eventually dissolves into the natural sounds of night.
She waits a minute, listening to the wind whistle through the trees. Then, she wets her lips and rubs at her face and runs back down the mountain.
32Elena
Elena shows up twenty minutes early, just to be as professional as possible. As early as it is, Gael insisted on walking her to set before going to explore. He waves his phone at her when she yells at him to keep it handy, and she feels a flicker of deep unease thinking of him on his own, especially after the creepy photos he seemed to be collecting. But theirs is the kind of relationship where her son doesn’t so much ask for permission as just lets her know what he’s doing.
Before he disappears down the road and Elena’s dark thoughts can consume her, a production assistant finds her and sits her in a chair, where she is told to wait. Her back is beginning to ache when, exactly three hours later, she is abruptly called, handed a costume, then yanked and jostled into place. Then, she waits again until the actors get set. She idles in her position on the dirt road with a handful of other over-enthusiastic extras, including Ken the bartender and an older woman who Elena thinks she recognizes as Kathy, the owner of the Whisper Ridge Inn. There have been moments when she’s felt like the whole thing is a little beneath her—like when Ken couldn’t do a surprised face without making a loud gasping noise, and she had to stand in position whilethey decided whether to boot him out of the scene, do a nineteenth take, or just edit out the sound. For her part, she’s made sure to be as easy to work with as anyone they’ve ever seen. The rub is that there hasn’t been a single moment of downtime to get Phillip Granger’s attention, to bend his ear in this professional setting like she had planned to.
Finally, though, they break for lunch. She pulls her phone out of her bag, which she stashed behind the catering table. She’s still wearing the old-timey costume—a floor-length dress with a dirt-smudged apron. Her hair is knotted in a tight bun. Walking as confidently as she can toward video village, she narrowly misses horse manure that has yet to be cleaned up. The guilty horse is tethered to a parking meter, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else but here.
“You and me both, buddy,” she says.
When she spots Phil, she calls his name and gives him a small wave, even though he’s only a few yards away. He turns, and so does one of the production assistants, who is showing him something on an iPad. He wears a black hat, like he’s Ron Howard, and even at this distance, she can see a crumble of food caught in the corner where beard meets mouth. Her wave is friendly, but inside, she’s mustering as much brass as she can manage. She is going to get what she wants if it kills her. Then, he looks away from her, and her stomach drops. That absolute ass. He’s pretending he doesn’t see her.
She turns away, ready to lose her cool, but she catches a glimpse of someone leaving the corner store in the distance. She almost trips over a cord as she moves to get a better look. The man’s graying hair and glasses are unfamiliar, but his ski-slope nose and broad shoulders are unmistakable, even this far away. She stands there for what feels like hours but can only be seconds, just watching him walk across the street. He doesn’t see her, doesn’t seem to care about the film at all. He just walks and walks.
“Elena.”
She turns abruptly at her name. Cal Pierce is striding toward her. Not sure if what she’s just seen is real or imagined, she glances back at the street. Mark Collingswood is gone. Before she left, before Quinn died, before any of it, Mark Collingswood changed her life. He’s the reason her kid exists. He’s the reason she has never come back to this town. All this time she’s been terrified—but of what? Looking at the stretch of street where he just was, she honestly has no idea what she was so afraid of. Because, strangely, in this moment, she finds she does not give a single fuck about him.
“Everything okay?” Cal is beside her now. She turns to look at him, snapping to attention and pushing Collingswood out of her mind, possibly for the last time. Cal’s hair is slicked back in a way that should be corny but somehow isn’t. He is in costume, wearing scruffy boots and suspenders.
“All good. You?”
“Actually, I wanted to ask you something.” He looks wary, like he’s not sure he wants to reveal what it is, but then he says, “There is a walk-on part available. I don’t know if you’d be interested, but one of our bit actors got some kind of insect bite yesterday, and they’re having trouble getting the swelling down. I think they’re taking her to the hospital. Anyway, Phil and I are assuming she’s not going to make it back, and we’re scheduled to shoot her scene tomorrow. It’s hardly anything at all, just three lines. And you’ll only have one day to prepare, which I realize is highly unprofessional, but we do need someone. You said you have acting experience, which is why I thought of you. It’s a long shot that you would even want to, but if you do…” He’s watching her face, which she is working hard to keep as neutral as possible. “Are you at all interested? If not, we can work with production to—”
“Interested,” she says quickly. Inside, her heart has started to beat hard against her ribs, but she does not want to betray any emotion.
Two men with headsets walk behind Cal talking about continuityerrors, and he lets them pass before he speaks again. “Full disclosure.” He leans in, fidgeting. “There is no bug bite. She quit. Harassment.”
“Oh, wow,” Elena says, genuinely surprised. Her eyes flick to Phil in his smug director’s hat.
“Just want you to know what you’re getting into,” Cal says with meaning. “Anyway, I assume you have a reel?”
“I do.” She fumbles with her phone. “I can send it to you.”
“Good. I want to go through the proper channels.”
To the right, Elena spots Nicola Bianco approaching. She wears a faded dress, similar in shape to Elena’s, but Nicola looks striking. Her hair, like Elena’s, is pulled into a severe bun, but wisps of it have been teased out, a sign that her character is in some distress. For some reason, this small detail makes Elena flush with anger. Nicola’s character may be a victim, but Nicola is certainly not.
“Hey,” says Cal. She offers a cheek, and he gives her a peck. Toward Elena, she flashes a lightning-quick smile.
The way she is hanging on Cal’s arm—feigning feminine ineptitude while, in fact, she has been scheming behind the scenes—it’s infuriating. Elena can’t help the rise in temperature that suddenly overtakes her. “Why the fuck did you go to Tom Winter’s house?”
Nicola blinks her doe eyes at Elena, then steals a look at Cal. He’s looking at the ground, pushing around dirt with a toe.
“Why does it matter?” Nicola says defiantly.
“Because a man’s child died. It was a long time ago, but grief is long. What kind of person does that?”
Nicola rolls her eyes, which comes across as almost comedic because of their size and beauty. Elena has the impression of a cartoon princess.
