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Startled, Katie met Madelynn’s eyes, and Madelynn smiled.
“Please. Going after what you want will feel a whole fuck of a lot safer if you will let me obliterate Ben Adelsward like a bad ghost floating through a cloud of sage.”
Katie laughed, an involuntary sound that came from her heart, where Madelynn’s vision of what Katie could have had released a surge of warm, bright hope.
But Katie had to press her palms flat against the surface of the table to keep them from shaking.
Every day this week, she’d sat at this table with her laptop open in front of her while her assistants and staff operated in hush mode, keeping their footsteps soft and their interruptions to a minimum. She’d downloaded a program that blocked the internet and filled the whole screen with a Zen-like blank field while playing soothing music.
Katie didn’t have a single word saved. She’d written a hundred different versions of the opening scene—the stage direction, the establishing shot, the first lines of dialogue—and then highlighted them and pressed delete.
It wasn’t just Ben. Her secret project was also scary because she didn’t know if she could pull it off.
I do wonder how ready you are for work out of the spotlight.
“I love your passion,” she told Madelynn. “But you and I both know that the last time Honor Howell agreed to back an actor’s production company, it collapsed in a MeToo-fueled meltdown over the actor’s bad behavior. Honor wants the people she works with to center the work and keep their personal lives utterly out of the public eye. The only reason she’s interested in working with me is that I talk about my cats and my work and literally nothing else.”
Madelynn pursed her lips. “Honor Howell knows you have a life. She isn’t asking you not to, but she does need to know if your life belongs to you. She needs to know if, behind the scenes, maybeyou’rethe one who’s manufacturing leaks, amplifying the story ofyour connection to Ben Adelsward every chance you get, even as you pretend to be over him.”
Katie clenched her hands and then released them, her heart racing.
Madelynn must have seen something in Katie’s face, because she sighed and said, “I can handle Honor Howell.”
“I haven’t asked you to,” Katie said much more tartly than she felt. “So here is whatI’vegot, as far as the pivot. The inside scoop, Madelynn. Next steps. What I’m doing. What you’re doing. Are you ready?”
“So ready.”
“In a few hours, I’m flying to Green Bay with my three cats to stay at my parents’ house and write an Oscar-winning script when the last thing I wrote was a paper in high school about the pros and cons of solar panels. I’ll probably eat a lot of bratwurst. We will open presents on Christmas Day, not Christmas Eve—that is for monsters. I’ve purchased a number of beautiful things for my babies, but I’m still on the lookout for something extra special for Trois, here. I will bring the AAC board so my children and I can keep working on expanding the horizons of human-animal communication.”
And maybe I’ll see Wil,Katie thought.
She’d never run into Wil on any of her earlier trips home. There were the years with Ben, when Katie didn’t go home because Ben didn’t want her to, and she didn’t want to do anything Ben didn’t want. Then, the years after that, when Katie had needed her parents to be simply, completely hers. She’d needed to go home and be fed, be talked to and fussed over by people who knew her and loved heronlyas Katie, their daughter.
But recently, Wil’s TikTok, which she published under the handle Wil-You-Or-Won’t-You, had done something to Katie’s memories about her last year living in Green Bay. Namely, reminded Katie that the year she was eighteen hadn’t beenallabout Ben.
Then, in Chicago, looking for her mom and Beanie in the VIP rows, she’d seen Wil. Her impossible white-blond hair gleaming in the light, curling against her neck. A flash of black leather. Her smooth skin, on first glance just as white-girl ordinary as Katie’s, but with a secret golden undertone that could ripen to a tan that looked perfect against tank tops and in a cheerleader’s uniform. Her serious, plugged-in expression, which Katie had spent months of their senior year of high school actively soliciting by talking to Wil about absolutely everything she could think of, because the experience of Wil listening to her thoughts, considering her ideas, taking her seriously, had felt so good as to be addictive.
To realize that it was all coming at her again, in that moment on the stage in Chicago, beingKatie—well. She’d been seriously disappointed not to see Wil at the meet and greet after the event.
Madelynn narrowed her eyes. “I can’t make a story out of any of that. Maybe ‘Christmas with the Prices,’ and I could send a photographer to take a picture of all of you, sans cats, in front of the tree with a few pull quotes about Midwest Christmas comfort foods, but I’d leave out ‘bratwurst.’” Before Katie could laugh, Madelynn narrowed her eyes more. “But there’s something else. About going home. Just now, I saw it. Something you’re not telling me.”
Katie schooled her features. “Is this what you wanted to do when you were little, Madelynn? Contemplate how ‘bratwurst’ plays in the media?”
“You’re hiding it from me even as you speak.” Madelynn sighed. “But to answer your diverting question with the same utter honesty I would like to receive from you, what I wanted when I was little was to be a spy.” Madelynn said this with the smallest hint of a dimple that told Katie she had decided to let Katie off the hook. For now.
“Really?” Katie looked at Madelynn carefully. “Areyou a spy?” she whispered.
“Torture me with one more cat headline, and maybe I’ll give myself up.”
Katie laughed, Madelynn signed off, and Katie looked out through the French doors toward her pool. Her house was quieter than usual, her staff already gone for the holidays in anticipation of Katie’s flight later today. It was nice to have the place completely to herself. It gave Katie the space to find her breath, center herself after the phone call with Madelynn, and let her mind drift.
All three of the cats had settled into favorite spots, Trois and Phil cuddled together in a bed that caught a beam of early morning sunlight and Sue deep inside the wool pod at the very top of the cat tree in the corner, where no one could get at her unawares, but she could see everything.
Katie had often thought how pleasant it would be to have a cat tower of her own, with a wool pod to hide inside.
She finished her burrito, stacking avocado on top of every bite, savoring the taste, which she’d miss in Wisconsin. When she’d pushed her plate aside, she picked up her phone and swiped through her social media—not her real-name accounts, but the accounts she’d created for her own private enjoyment, where she could leave a “like” on an ad for a cat toy or a post by the person who’d inspired her to set up AAC buttons for Sue, Trois, and Phil without setting off a maelstrom of weird effects.
She saved TikTok for last.