Page 57
“We’ll figure this out,” she said. “Together. If there’s one thing I believe in, Bradley, it’s you.”
Her words were spoken warmly, but they burned inside him like the impulse to drink. Devra believed in him. He wanted her to believe in him, craved it even. But Adele’s warning of wrong paths and uncertain futures amplified his doubts as to whether her belief was justified.
“We’ll figure this out,” she repeated, giving him a gentle squeeze. “I know we will.”
His body felt more alive pressed against hers. The feel of her soft curves, their shared heartbeat.
He was breathing in the scent of her floral shampoo when he felt her go slack.
“You all right?” He pulled out of their embrace.
She didn’t reply. Her gaze trapped behind him.
Bradley whirled around. “What is it?” The electronics store was full of blinking lights and bright screens. Nothing stood out to him as unusual, but what seemed mundane to him could be a trigger for her.
“What’s wrong?”
Devra slowly raised her hand, like the Ghost of Christmas Past, a single finger pointing to a screen mounted high in the window display, where some holiday movie was playing on a sixty-inch Samsung. An attractive woman with auburn hair and an affinity for dramatic hand gestures was speaking to a bearded, woodsy-looking man straight out of small-town-romance central casting.
“I don’t understand,” Bradley said. “What is it?”
“That’s my mother.”
DEVRA
Look up. That’s what the fortune teller had told her to do, but Devra had been so quick to dismiss Adele Ariadne. Until she’d looked up.
Her mother had been waving her hands around, letting her movements tell her story, even with the sound muted. And in that moment, Devra had finally understood. She’d felt what Bradley must have been feeling during the entire card reading.
There was power in believing.
Whatever doubts had been flickering to life were now extinguished for good. They were going to track down her mother. They were going to break her curse.
The actress’s name, her mother’s name, was Charlotte Montgomery. Nothing like Madeline Harriot or Maddy Wilson, as her father had suspected. They would never have tracked her down on their own, at least not in time. No one in Devra’s family was particularly interested in made-for-TV romcoms, or celebrity gossip, but apparently her mother had been making a name for herself with a series of leading movie roles. Devra had scanned through a hundred online pictures of her mother dolled up and smiling and posing on one red carpet or another.
She was beautiful.
In fact, at the shopping mall, when Devra spotted her mother’s character in A Country Christmas Caper, her first thought was My mother is stunning. She thought it before she really grasped that it was her mother on the screen, the timeline muddled by her shock. It looked as if her mother hadn’t aged a day. And suddenly Devra wasn’t in the middle of the mall but sitting on the sofa in her childhood home, watching her mother perform a dramatic charade, her father smiling adoringly at the woman who used to bring fun into their lives. Before his smiles became few and far between, and the fun stopped entirely.
Now Devra was on her way to confront this beautiful, heartbreaking, traitorous woman in person.
The intercity coach juddered to life at the terminal. Bradley sat close, his fingers intertwined with hers. Her mind kept leaping to the last time she’d come to this bus station, the futility of it, her sixteen- year-old self turning around before her search had really begun, utterly despondent. But this time she had him by her side. And as fearful and nervous as she was, she also felt new courage. Not only because of his comforting presence, but because of how he reflected her own strength back at her, reminding her what she was capable of.
Plus, this time, she had an actual destination.
As a celebrity, Charlotte Montgomery had been difficult to contact directly. They sent a few emails through her fan-mail site, emotional pleas for her mother to get in touch with her. One of which was replied to with So nice to hear from another fan! Likely an automated reply or the lazy composition of an assistant who didn’t believe for a second Devra’s story was grounded in reality.
So Devra and Bradley and Squally had scoured the internet. They discovered Charlotte was currently filming a sequel to A Country Christmas Caper. In Vancouver. Less than a thousand kilometres away. Of course it was still a major city, so they needed to narrow down where to look. They made a few phone calls to people lower in the hierarchy, staff and paparazzi who were easier to track down and more inclined to reply to an email or pick up their phones. They played a few roles of their own to get the information they needed, pretending to be production assistants or reporters. Bradley was a surprisingly good actor for someone who habitually spewed honesty. At last, they found a reliable source with loose lips and discovered where Charlotte Montgomery would be for lunch on the eighteenth, with all probability. And Devra liked probabilities.
They were taking the overnight bus now, on their way to ambush her mother in the lobby of the Waterworth Cafe in Yaletown.
Devra would finally have her answers. It surprised her to discover the question burning hottest inside her wasn’t about the curse at all.
Why did you leave me?
A question she hadn’t allowed herself to think about in decades. A wound pushed deep down beneath the others. One that apparently still throbbed, an infection ignored.
“You okay?” Bradley whispered over the rumbling motor.
