Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 65643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 328(@200wpm)___ 263(@250wpm)___ 219(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 328(@200wpm)___ 263(@250wpm)___ 219(@300wpm)
“I’ll do what I can on my end. I owe you a few anyway.” She hesitated. “It’ll be okay, Garrett.”
She’d said that when we divorced, too. She’d been right. Everything had been better than okay. But she wasn’t right now. As much as I’d loved Noemi–and still did–a small, secret part of my soul had exhaled with relief when she asked for the divorce. It had been crushed under the landslide of hurt and sadness and fear, but it had lived. It had breathed.
Now, I felt there was a pair of hands bracketed around my throat, squeezing, the knuckles blanching white. I wanted to fight back, but the problem with paparazzi is that, even when you see them everywhere, they’re still a phantom opponent. You can’t take a swing at the one camera that can ruin everything. You can’t deliver a knockout punch to the one who is about to blow up your life.
There was no relief.
There was no air.
There was only the pounding of the blood in my brain and the drumbeat thought I have to fix this.
And the choking realization that I couldn’t.
30
DESTINY
When I heard a key in the lock of my apartment, I expected to see Garrett letting himself in. But even before the door swung fully open, a sixth sense had whispered that it wasn’t him. The movement was too hesitant, and had I heard a click of nails against the brass knob?
“Destiny?” the voice reached me before the sight computed.
“Mom?” Happiness surged through me, propelling me off the couch and into the small foyer where she was setting down her overnight bag. “What are you doing here?”
After that, my memories of what happened next fragment. A slice of a long, fierce hug. The determined, protective look on her face that I hadn’t seen since the early days of Magical Melody when she would go toe-to-toe with the studio to make sure I got enough time for school and a “real life.” And then, the reason for her impromptu visit.
My memory mercifully blurred the contours of this memory. I know that my mom had to have told me that there were pictures circulating of her twenty-five-year-old daughter with the forty-year-old ex-husband of Noemi Thompson. The ex-husband who had just tried to strongarm a director into giving her daughter a role. Her daughter who was supposed to be dating Andrew Quinn, who in a case of spectacularly bad timing, had just alluded to me in his latest interview. He’d called me someone special who I’ve loved for a long time. He didn’t use my name, but everybody knew.
And now everybody knew the rest.
I fixated on the point about Garrett and the director, letting the rest of it fade into the background. He’d tried to force someone to give me a part. And by all accounts, it had been in front of Julian. Humiliation and rage burned through me. I felt every bit of professional credit I’d earned over the years going up in the flames. It would never matter again that I’d never missed a call time, that I’d known the names, close family members, and birthdays of everyone on the Magical Melody set. I would forever be known as that one actress who sent her boyfriend in to take what she couldn’t earn for herself.
And the rumor would be uglier than that, because as far as the public knew, I had a boyfriend, and he wasn’t Garrett Thompson. So, it would become a story about this one actress who cheated on her boyfriend and slept with her friend’s ex-husband in order to get him to force a director into giving her a part.
I covered my burning cheeks with my hands.
My mom must have made the flight arrangements because I have no recollection of booking our tickets. My next memory is of pulling the brim of a baseball cap low over my face and bundling my long dark hair into a knot at the nape of my neck before I got out of the car. The cold wind slid across my exposed neck, my eyes fixed on the ground. I wore baggy sweats and a long-sleeved shirt. I didn’t make eye contact with a single person other than the TSA agent. I was so tense that I might have been encased in wood instead of skin, like I thought if I could physically repel the photographs that would inevitably be taken if I were recognized.
I didn’t look at my phone, but it vibrated with increasing frequency in my pocket. The story was heating up.
Later, I’d look. I’d see dozens of texts and missed phone calls. Friends. My agent. Noemi. Garrett. And about fifty unknown numbers that had to be reporters looking for a sound bite. I’d gotten out of LA just in time. If we’d gotten on the flight that took off two hours later, they’d have been lying in wait at the entrance of the airport.