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There was a nervous titter from the audience and the press.
Honor Howell recrossed her legs.
“Katie!” A man raised up his finger. “Thank you. Ben Adelsward recently mentioned toVarietythat you were starting a productioncompany. I can only imagine he has the inside scoop for a good reason. Have the two of you set the past aside to work together again?”
Diana softly gasped. Beanie slid her hand over top of Wil’s, which was when Wil noticed she was gripping her own knee, her knuckles bloodless. Diana started tapping rapidly at the screen of her phone.
“No.” Katie delivered this single syllable with absolute finality. “Linda?” She looked at an older woman at the edge of the press pool.
“Hi, Katie. Honestly, I have the same question. Ben seemed to know a lot about what you were up to.”
“Asked and answered.” Katie smiled, her shoulders fascinatingly relaxed, her expression satisfyingly bored. But Honor Howell had turned to stone across from her.
These were two very powerful women transmitting—or, in Katie’s case,concealing—a lot of intense emotion. Wil didn’t know what the whole story was, but the stakes of whatever was going on between Katie and Honor were palpable.
Also, Diana was completely freaking out.
“Zara! How nice to see you.” Katie nodded at Zara Hurst, a former actress who Wil had grown up watching in dark indie teen movies. Zara now had a wildly famous podcast where she interviewed celebrities about their secret special interests.
“Hey! So, I think I speak for everyone when I tell you that wehaveto know if your beautiful cat children, Phil, Trois, and Sue, are as welcome on set when you’re directing as they’ve been when you’re in front of the camera. Do they have their own trailer? Do they get brand-new producer credits?”
This reference to Katie’s cats, who were internet famous, and whom Katie talked about in all her interviews, made Katie laugh. The audience followed suit, approving the question with their own delighted laughter, and Beanie’s hand let go of Wil’s knee. Finally,Honor Howell’s posture relaxed, and Diana made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.
It was strange, Wil thought, how obvious it was that no one in this enormous room, Honor Howell included, seemed to want Katie to be forced to talk about Ben Adelsward.
And yet the questions never stopped coming, even all these years later.
“Only Phil gets producer credits,” Katie said. “After his profile inVoguelast year, he signed with my agency, sohehas a contract.”
The cat question, and Katie’s response, signaled the tone and permissible subject matter of the rest of the press questions, which didn’t last long before Honor stood abruptly, indicating that the interview was complete. The lights came up to half intensity over the audience. Wil watched as Sasha and the other interns set up microphones in the aisles for students to line up behind.
Katie looked into the audience, waving a bit, and Wil watched as she clocked her mom, beamed, and gave her a tiny finger wave. Then her gaze swept to Beanie and—as Wil’s breath caught—to her.
Katie didn’t hold her gaze, or wave, or make any expression beyond pleasant interest in the crowd. But then she looked completely away and smiled in a way she hadn’t smiled yet.
Wil bit the inside of her cheek to school her expression as she felt Beanie’s attention hone in on her. She didn’t really want her mother’s insights and observations right now. She wanted to take that smile of Katie’s and think about it all by herself. As many times as possible.
Something new to go with the old memories.
Later, after they skipped the meet and greet because Diana said it would distract Katie to have “people from home” there, and after Beanie dropped Wil off at her house—their conversation from Chicago to Green Bay having remained as safely in its lane as Beanie’s Prius—Wil didn’t let herself think about Katie.
She didn’t think about Katie the whole time she pulled out two chairs in front of the white bedsheet she used as a backdrop, or turned on the secondhand photographer’s lights she’d picked up at an estate sale, or clamped her phone in its tripod, getting ready to film for her TikTok channel.
She didn’t think about Katie when the doorbell rang, or when she let in the pretty woman with big brown eyes who she’d met in a parking garage next to the library a few days ago, giving her directions to the YWCA and then, on an impulse, inviting her over tonight.
She especially didn’t think of Katie Price after she pressed the phone’s red record button and kissed this woman, softly, and then much more seriously and deeply.
But she wanted to.
Chapter Two
“Good morning, tiny babies!” Katie Price clapped her hands together and surveyed her three cats. Cat breakfast was one of her favorite times of day.
“I think for this morning,” Katie said, opening the cat cabinet, “we’ll go with the mousse puree texture, in deference to Sue’s adventure at the dentist. She seemed to struggle a bit with the shreds yesterday. What do the three of you think?”
Sue had her sleek brown-and-black back to Katie, which, fair. She had gone in for a tooth cleaning earlier in the week, and she hadn’t looked Katie in the face since. She was enraged at the little shaved-off area around her leg from the IV, so Katie was giving her space for now.
Katie definitely understood how it felt to be betrayed.