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If that part of her hadn’t looked longingly at the cameras and tools and lights and sets for years and spent frustrating hours with directing mentors who weren’t certain why she wanted to know this stuff when she easily had everything she could possibly want.
She could fall back on Katie Price. But Katie Price had never been exactly what she wanted. Not all of what she wanted.Katie Pricewasn’t actually a real person—not to the world, not even to the people she loved.
And it wasn’t Diana who had to understand this.
It washer.
Her mother was still rubbing her back. Soothing her. “I know it’s wrong of me to want to… manage things between you and Wil. But the thing is, Katie, I’m not sure you’ve thought about how much capacityWilhas for managing what could happen if the world finds out the two of you are involved with each other.”
“Oh.” Apparently there were still only a limited number of things that Katie could try.
She shrugged off her mom’s back rub and her dangerous and scary remark implying that even knowing Katie, even caring about her, might ruin Wil’s life.
“Katie.”
“What.”
“We’re fighting,” Diana said gently, “in that way that we fight where I don’t really know what’s going on.”
“If you say so.” Katie sighed with obvious irritation. “For the record, I am appalled you didn’t give Wil anything to eat or drink.”
Diana had the grace to wince. “Well!”
“Very good talk.” Katie stood up. “I will look forward to the next one, where we both blubber all the way through the truth of what we were actually fighting about this time.”
“I love you,” Diana said.
“Don’t come downstairs,” Katie told her.
She left without looking to see how that landed with her mom. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want the hangover from April and Madelynn’s talk, she didn’t want any of Diana’s words and looks and moves, and she didn’t want to have to go back to writing her script again in this new world where her retreat was less and less like a retreat and more like a reckoning.
She didn’t want to explain to Wil about security and how they pretended like it didn’t cause major logistical issues every time Katie only wanted to go to a bookstore or pick out a baby gift herself or fuckingdrive.
She didn’t want Wil—in her scalding jeans with torn-off back pockets—to ever, ever have to run, hunched over, to an open car door, with her hand up to block the camera flashes.
She wanted Wil to stomp, to stride, to wink, to dominate.
She wanted to let herself fall for Wil and let Wil fall for her like the only consequences were what they would’ve been the first time, if Katie hadn’t had to leave for Chicago, if Wil hadn’t been on her way to Michigan, if Jasper Greene hadn’t been dying, if Katie had never met Ben Adelsward.
When she opened the door to her suite, Wil was standing beside the cat buttons with a purring Trois under one arm, Phil weaving back and forth between her ankles, while Sue insistently poked the treat button and then waited for Wil to feed her one of the Temptations from the bag Diana had left behind.
“Hi,” Katie said, her heart huge and frantic and worried and half-gone.
Wil turned around. “Kim Kardashian.”
“Is a complicated woman.”
Wil smiled a tight smile and set Trois down on the floor. She shook a small handful of treats out of the bag and set a few down in front of each cat, then stepped away to signal that the activity had come to an end. “Kim Kardashian is obsessed with getting people’s sentences commuted. She’s done a lot of political work, and then she decides she’ll be more effective with a law degree, so she got a four-year apprenticeship in California with the exact right people to help her get that done and took the bar until she passed it, like failure wasn’t an option.”
“Yes.” Katie had the impression she’d left Wil alone too long. “Kim is a very driven person.”
“What do I even want to do?” Wil asked.
Yes. She had left Wil alone too long.
“That is an overwhelming question to ask yourself.” Katie walked over and picked up Wil’s hand, pulling her to the sofa. She knew it was dangerous to sit on this sofa with Wil, but she was so beyond caring now that she was in the same room with her, holding her hand. She welcomed Wil’s careless solipsism. “When you start to look at it that way.”
“I always had in the back of my mind, I guess, that if I did this again, I would go to Michigan. Then that cabal of lawyers at Kettle’s are telling me that I could go to Harvard or Yale or UCLA or Northwestern or Loyola or Pepperdine, and all of those places are very different, with different opportunities for mentorship and career paths and where I’d live, and I have no idea how to even begin to make a decision.”