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In Los Angeles, there would be meetings double-booked over at least two weeks as soon as Katie returned. Directors. Brands. Madelynn’s team. Studio sit-downs. Strategy sessions for the PR tour for her next feature release. Designer consults on wardrobe for the upcoming awards season. Her accounting team and wealth manager. Her PA and her PA’s assistant.
Katie reached for the dialogue for her scene that she’d figured out on her coffee run—the scene she’d been ready to put down as soon as she came into the room—but she’d lost it. She couldn’t remember anymore what it was that she’d wanted to write.
What she wanted to say.
“So we’re good,” April said. Katie could feel the excited energy coming off her body and brain.
“I can’t promise that,” Madelynn replied. “For example, Marisolcalled me an hour ago looking for a guarantee that Katie was not involved, in any way, with Ben Adelsward, and Honor called ten minutes after that, asked after all the news with my family, and then asked me if Markham Lockwood had called me and why.”
“Oh my God,” Katie said. “What did you tell her? Both of them?”
“I focused on flattering them outrageously.”
Katie looked at the ceiling.
Back in LA, she would have to fight for six hours a night to sleep, weighing what appearances she could turn down without taking a hit to the visibility that kept everyone paid, and disappoint people in order to spend time with other people who she actually liked.
People like these two women.
Her heart supplied another name and then, right after, banged against her sternum painfully.
Because that was impossible. Where would Wil live in the middle of Katie’s life? How would she go to law school? How would she do all the things that came with law school, the clerkships and internships and social hours and writing? How would she be taken seriously on a campus when there were paparazzi waiting by a coffee cart to take her picture after a long night of studying so the internet could speculate on whether she and Katie were having relationship problems?
Why would she want that, any of it?
And it wasn’t howshewanted Wil. Which was something like that house in Ann Arbor, that other life, the one that hadn’t happened. Except how could she have that andalsomake Marisol’s movie andalsosee Wil take on the halls of justice in just the way she was meant to?
It was impossible.
“Katie.” April reached over to take Katie’s hand.
Madelynn’s frown made Katie’s heart sink. “It’s not going to stop,” she said simply. “I can deny and privately reassure until I’m blue in the face, but at the end of the day, no one is going to be able to take you seriously as a creator if Ben Adelsward is behind you claiming to pull your strings. And don’t look at me like that, because I know as well as you do that hedoesn’tpull your strings, but Katie, I’m sorry,it does not matter. It doesn’t matter what’s real in Hollywood. It only matters whatlooksreal. If it looks like Ben’s running your show, if itlookslike he has the power to make or break your projects, then he does. What people need to see is your power. Marisol’s not going to want to sign on with a man she can’t control, who youwon’tcontrol, who has the ability to destroy her film. It’s a deal-breaker, and not just for Marisol.”
There it was.
Katie was a puppet. Ben had found her and made her his puppet, and his control over the early part of her career meant that even though she’d left him, even though she’d worked hard and earned her reputation, even though she’d been good, better, the best, and never allowed even a hint of a scandal to touch her name, it only mattered that she had once been a puppet, and she stilllookedlike one.
That was Hollywood.
Maybe she could make it different, one day, for other Katies.
She wouldn’t let herself so much as glance at her laptop. She’d had a handful of days making something she knew was good, that made her feel like herself. Made her feel powerful. That was all she would have, because how Katiefeltdidn’t make a Hollywood-changing deal.
How shefeltdidn’t make a life.
“There’s another way,” Madelynn said. “And I have never, ever said what I am about to say to any client, but I’m going to say it to you, because I love you. What you have to do istrust me.”
Katie nodded. She wasn’t really listening anymore. She was thinking a little wildly that she’d told more than one person the reason Madelynn was her last publicist was because Madelynn always did what Katie told her to do. She focused on Katie’s projects, not on Katie’s feelings.
Trust me.
I love you.
Madelynn was asking Katie for a different kind of relationship. That meant Madelynn was telling Katieshewanted to be a part of making something other than money and reputation and awards. Something that was a tiny, tiny bit of the Katie Price who ran a cool local theater company and met friends for coffee and held their babies.
“This is not a today project,” April said. “You are on retreat. It’s not even Christmas yet. The three of us haven’t done the thing where we courier over expensive gifts to each other’s assistants with glittery cards as big as magazines.”
Madelynn laughed. “You know what?”