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“Nothing. I love that song.” Katie couldn’t help but notice that some of the dark despair had lifted out of her voice. Wil was purposely cheering her up.
Because Wil was a lovely, generous person who deservedsomeone who was just as generous. Someone brave who didn’t keep secrets.
“Me, too,” Wil said. “My point is that we’re interested in Mr. Cook not because we’re interested in Mr. Cook. No one cares about him. No one. We care about these women. Our fantasy, when we were kids, was to figure it out and then tell the women. Right? We didn’t even care what happened to him as a result of our intrusive meddling. Probably he would disappear, or die. Whatever.”
“Any recent meddling?” Madelynn asked. “Do I want to know?”
“Definitely not,” Katie said. “We’re safe. People only get worked up aboutmenwho randomly show up on their doorbell cameras after dark. Plus, I wore a wig.”
Madelynn’s eyes had gone wide, but Wil kept her attention squarely on Katie. “The thing is, Ben Adelsward is essentially just Mr. Cook, scaled up. In Mr. Cook’s classroom, you were the most interesting thing.You.He used you, in the sense that he accepted your flattery even though he’d done nothing to earn it, in the sense that you made his class work for him, and he got all the credit. Ben used you, too, to scale up. He still is. All Madelynn wants to do is point this out. You don’t even have to tell the whole story. It’s the chance to say to Ben, and to all the Mr. Cooks out there, ‘Oh my God, just fucking find something else to do! Be worthwhile!Whyare you? You think you’re so great, but you keep harassing girls and women so that everyone else thinks you’re great, too!’” Wil looked at Madelynn for confirmation.
“That’s a version,” Madelynn agreed.
Katie barely heard her. She wanted to understand what Wil meant, but the comparison of Ben to Mr. Cook only made her notice that she couldn’t think about either of them without feeling failure and loss.
Wil’s blue eyes narrowed. She seemed to understand that Katie wasn’t with her yet. “So, here’s an observation. In high school, youstartedwith the goal to distract Mr. Cook from being a bully in class with your overly interested questions and compliments. But it wasn’t long before you were making sure everyone in that class had at least one good hour in their day.”
Katie frowned. “I don’t remember it like that.”
“I do. Before that class, no one we went to school with had really known who you were. I had known you since I was born, andIdidn’t really know you. You’d been so preoccupied with acting and singing and dancing. No one has the kind of passion you did in high school, and when kids don’t understand something or someone, they avoid it or lash out against it.”
Madelynn had stopped taking notes and was listening, not like Katie’s publicist, but like a friend. Katie made herself take a deep breath and tell herself that right now, she was safe.
“But there you were in that class,” Wil said, “with this objectively bad person at the front of the room who had all the power, and you stepped up to him. You met his power with your power. And what you did was show us that you were this person who wanted to know everyone’s story. You wanted to hear what they had to say. You wanted everyone to have an experience. You made it so it wasn’t Mr. Cook’s class anymore, and that wasimportant. That’s why people still talk about it. Every class get-together, every reunion you’re not at, they come up to me, they sit down, and it turns out they want to talk about Katie Price in Mr. Cook’s class. Even before they talk about your career. Because it meant something.”
“I don’t…” Katie’s chest felt warm and tight. She reached for words but couldn’t find any.
Wil smiled. “So that was my long-winded way of saying that you have to remind everyone, exactly the wayyouwould, and not like anyone tells you to, that your own story belongs toyou.”
Then, Wil gave Madelynn a look that meant,I’m more right about how she should do this than you could ever be.
Which Katie loved, because Wil was establishing the dominance of her love with one of the most powerful publicists in California, and she made Madelynn smile with approval while she did it.
Katie loved Wil.
Wil had come to California. After all these years. She’d come here. Beanie and Diana and the whole entire world, including Katie, had been uncertain, but Wil had come, and she’d brought Almond Butter with her, even. She’d bedazzled Cy Newhouse and Joel Starr, admired herself in a paparazzi photograph, had a mysterious meeting with law schools, charmed Madelynn, and gotten the truth out of Katie.
God.God.
What if Katie let the people who loved herloveher?
“I need some air.” Katie looked at Madelynn, who nodded agreement. Then she reached out her hand to Wil. “Walk with me?”
She was relieved when Wil took her hand.
She took Wil outside, along a brick pathway that wound behind the pool house and terminated at a gate in the wall behind her property.
“There’s a trailhead a few yards from here. It’s a three-mile loop, but sometimes I just follow it for the first mile, then take a cut through that’s a quarter mile. It’s steep but very pretty. Is that okay?”
“Sure.”
Katie put in the code for the gate. She sent a message to her security and turned on tracking on her phone so her people would know where she was.
She stepped out with Wil under a huge desert willow and crunched through some gravel to the trailhead.
For the first half mile, they just walked. The trail was narrowand steep, sometimes with a few wooden stairs. All the trails near Katie’s property had a lot of trees, which she’d learned the names to after a whole life in Wisconsin, where a stand of birch trees was exotic. If she didn’t need forgiveness, she would have pointed them out to Wil and showed her all her tiny favorite places along the way.
Katie moved her hair away from her ear and around her shoulder. Then she did it again, moving her hair to the other shoulder. All of her muscles felt a little too big and hot. She was glad for a cool breeze. California was making itself pretty for Wil.