“Settle down, mister.” She set their breakfast specials in front of them. “Anyway, it sounds interesting.” She needed something interesting in her life. Something that wasn’t Rafe, and wasn’t racing out of town without a plan.
“Can you email me a resume?” Greg lifted a reassuring hand at what must have looked like apprehension on her face. “Honestly, we don’t need many qualifications other thanknows Pine Harbour better than us. But HR likes us to cross our t’s and dot our i’s.”
“Yeah, I can do that.” Behind her, Frank dinged the bell.
Greg and Trey left with a wave right in the midst of the first breakfast crush, right before Deena, the second waitress, showed up.
At ten, once they hit the mid-morning lull, Frank waved her away when she asked for an hour. She dashed home and googled both men and the company. Reassured they weren’t scam artists, she sent off her resume to Greg’s email address, including a couple of questions about compensation and a job description.
When she returned to the diner for lunch service, her city visitors were waiting. Greg waved his phone at her. “I thought it would be easier to answer your questions in person. And eat whatever Frank has on special because it’s sure to be delicious.” He winked at her as the man in question made a pleased harrumphing noise from the kitchen.
“I think that bought us ten minutes,” she whispered and pointed them to a booth. Them coming back was a good sign. It had to be.
“So here’s the deal…” Trey outlined what they needed—someone who could take video and pictures on demand—fill in the details of the high-level sketch from the two trips up north by their staff—and do some legwork in advance of their monthly visits.
“What should I say to property owners?” Olivia didn’t want to misrepresent a film studio. But the thought of playing a small part in the making of a movie made her want to squeal with glee.Thiswas something fun and exciting that didn’t involve her heart or her ex-husband.
“Nothing, hopefully. We’ll take care of negotiating contracts with property owners. We just want you to document what we can’t see from our visits and internet research. As we get closer to filming, the role might expand a bit—that would be up to you. But basically, we need someone on-call for occasionalget up and go find something out for uswork. Probably once or twice a week for a few hours at a time, but it might be more than that.”
“How much more?” She didn’t want to burn out, but the thought of earning a few hundred bucks more a month was really appealing.
“Well, we’d pay a stipend of a thousand dollars a month to start, but if you ended up doing a lot we could increase that.” She frowned, trying to do the math in her head, but every way she turned it that seemed like a lot of money for what they described. Misreading her silence, Trey glanced sideways at Greg. “We can go as high as twelve hundred dollars to start, but if that’s not enough, then maybe we should find a teenager—“
“No, that’s…fine.” More than fine. Freedom-level fine. Super fine. She swallowed hard. “You swear to me this isn’t anything illegal? My ex-husband’s a cop.”
Greg laughed. “The only thing illegal is how fast I’m going to drive back to city so this guy can tuck his kids in tonight.”
Fair enough. “What do we need to do to make this official?”
— —
It turned out that in the twenty-first century, it was pretty easy to get hired by a company five hours away. Within twenty-four hours, Olivia had a brand new iPhone and MacBook Air delivered by courier, property of Dancelight Productions, and an upgraded internet connection at home that allowed her to connect via VPN to the Dancelight servers. She only had access to an empty Pine Harbour Project folder, which didn’t tell her anything about this mysterious movie that she was going to help find filming sites for, but still…it was exciting.
She had a sheaf of papers to sign and send back, so she printed them before her shift and at a mid-afternoon lull, poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down in an empty booth to fill them out on her break. In an uncharacteristically social move, Frank slid into the seat opposite. “Pretty exciting stuff.”
“I’m not going to let it interfere with work.” A niggle of worry had eaten away at her all day, that Frank would be upset. She was excited about this project in a way that she just wasn’t about serving coffee at the diner.
He snorted. “I’m not worried about that, Olivia. You’ve been a great employee.”
She searched his face for a reason not to let her enthusiasm bubble over—she didn’t find one. “A movie might be shot right here in Pine Harbour, can you imagine?”
“Should be a nice steady stream of income for a few months, no doubt.” He kicked her foot gently under the table. “And it’ll be nice to keep you around a little longer.”
A single wet, fat tear rolled down her cheek, startling both of them. Frank turned red and Olivia busied herself with the confidentiality agreement in front of her. “Oops, it says here I can’t tell anyone about the movie.”
They both laughed. There was no way that it would stay a secret for long. Frank reached across the table and roughly patted her on the arm. “I never thought you’d work for me forever, Olivia. You think these movie folks are going to take you away from me before you hightail it out of town anyway?”
She flushed at the bald honesty. Her guilt was definitely misplaced. “No. They don’t want to piss you off,” she teased, knowing that Greg had phoned Frank earlier and made the initial inquiry about using the diner for some outdoor secondary shooting.
“I kind of like the idea of Mac’s being memorialized like that,” he chuffed. “And it’s good to see you so excited about something that isn’t Rafe Minelli, that no-good deadbeat.”
She laughed again and tipped her head back against the booth’s cushion. “You love Rafe.”
“Sure, everyone loves Rafe. And you. But the two of you are like…” He scratched his chin.
She sighed. “I know, oil and water.”
“Nah, that’s not it. You mix well at first. Too well, as evidenced by him batting his pretty brown eyes at you and you falling into his arms last week.” He lifted his hand at her gaping mouth. “I’m never going to say this again, Olivia, so let me have my piece now. You’re more like two explosive chemicals—individually dangerous, but deadly in combination. And entirely unstable.”