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“It’s perplexing, for sure.” Katie dabbed her mouth with her napkin. “Have you googled ‘secret’?”
“I have. Asecretis information no one else but your publicist knows. That’s fromMerriam-Webster’s.” Madelynn raised one of her eyebrows, so sharp they could noiselessly bifurcate a tabloid rumor with the slightest contact.
“So obviously thereareno secrets”—Katie made an expansive gesture with her hand—“because it turns out everyone knows about my project,somehow.” Katie sighed over the tight pinch in her stomach. “What did my mother bribe you with to keep you off my back for a week?”
“She sent me a basket of peanut butter meltaways from Seroogy’s.”
“Damn. That is a good bribe.” Seroogy’s was a candy store, local to the Green Bay area, particularly well-loved for their meltaways. Katie took another huge bite of burrito. Sue jumped up onto the table and inserted herself in the frame.
“Katie.”
“Mm-hmm.” Katie chewed. She offered Sue an opportunity to investigate the burrito, but Sue was more interested in the queso, which she licked delicately from the edge of Katie’s plate. Madelynn shuddered at Sue’s proximity to Katie’s burrito.
Madelynn did not feel the same way about cats that Katie did. It was hard to find a Madelynn who also loved cats.
It was hard to find a Madelynn, period.
Katie put another bite of burrito in her mouth, because she knew there was no way to have this conversation with Madelynn without talking about Ben Adelsward, and she was not interested in doing that. It had been enough for her, more than enough, to spend three years dating the twelve-years-older, tall, dark, and handsome leading man who’d swept her up and moved her to Hollywood and “given” her a career.
He had also given her an STI, a broken heart, and a lot of trauma that she’d been diligently working on with her therapist every Tuesday for almost a decade.
Katie hadn’t dated anyone since Ben, seen anyone, fallen in love with anyone, fucked anyone. It felt right to her to take this time, and lately she and her therapist had been talking through some super-interesting ideas about gender and sexuality that were helping Katie get a bead on why that was.
ButEntertainment Weeklywas not a fan. The entire Hollywood gossip complex had spent Katie’s ten years on break from romance flipping back and forth between “Katie’s still in love with Ben!!!!” and “Katie’s a freak and the reason Ben has been dating eighteen-year-olds ever since!!!!”
Meanwhile, no matter how often she changed her number, the cockhead kept texting her. He did it every time Katie was nominated for or won an award or got a project with a salary north of $15 million.
Hey, Katie.
She was always tempted to text him back something cutting, but she did not do that. She blocked and walked.
Yet even when Katie did everything she was supposed to do to take care of herself, Ben Adelsward inserted himself into her story. He’d told the press she was starting a production company—information that Katie and her agent, April Feinstein, had controlled as tightly as they could—and his decision to do so had derailed Katie’s event in Chicago.
Leaks were inevitable, no matter how trustworthy her inner circle was. But the fact that Ben had managed to get his hands on this particular news and release it at a moment that Katie had expected to behersleft her feeling deflated, unimportant, and trapped.
That was his goal.
Ben had brought her all the way to Hollywood and put her in front of everything she had planned on earning for herself, and then when she did get those things,earningthem despite him, despite all of it, he wouldn’t stop reminding her that it was really because of him. Even now, a decade later, he wanted her to feel like she could never get away from him. He wanted her to feel like everything she had, she had because he’d given it to her.
That was Ben’s thing. It was what madehimfeel like a Hollywood god.
The worst part was that he’d caught her up in this bullshit when she was eighteen and barely knew who she was. When all of her experiences, despite being alegal adult(Ben’s point), were those of a child. Katie had managed to win herself a spot in an elite summer stock program outside of Chicago before she was supposed to go to the University of North Carolina’s School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. All of it was already a big deal for someone who’d never even left the band of states around the Great Lakes, and then there was Ben, so yes. She’d fallen for him, their acting teacher. She’d fallen for what he said about how mature she was, with all the authority of a thirty-year-old A-list actor who “still did independent projects.”
His self-effacing humor. His charming patter, as though he were always sitting with one ankle crossed over his knee, a mug of coffee in his hand, exchanging quips with a talk-show host in a careless display of male whiteness. His broody dark eyes, his three-days-of-stubble beard, his pouty mouth and full head of dark hair that looked like he’d just raked his fingers through it.
To Katie, Ben Adelsward had seemed like someone who knew everything she was so desperate to learn, and at first, what she’d fallen for was what he told her about herself.
She hadn’t known the difference between his grooming and her own awareness that she had something special. Ben singling her out for attention, praise, had felt, at first, like confirmation. Katiehadit. Ben said so.
But then, gradually, there had been a shift in what Ben told her about herself. He’d started to say she would be such a beautyone day,that she had theungerminated seeds of potential talent,if only she would learn how to use it. She did so many things wrong. But lucky for Katie, Ben was generous and brave enough to tell her the bald truth that no one else would say.
Lucky, lucky Katie Price.
She didn’t judge the girl she’d been with Ben. Not anymore. There had been some difficult years of panic attacks and waves of shaky shame when Katie couldn’t convince herself, some days, that she was trulyreal. When she felt like a body moving through space, a character to be dressed and pushed out under the footlights.
The work had saved her. She kept making movies, kept reaching inside herself to find a way to feel and think and talk like another woman, and doing that reminded her of what it meant to be human.
She never judged the characters she played. She couldn’t judge herself.